March 18, 2004
The male gaze#4: inversion
There is some material on the male gaze posted by Mike over Collective Lounge. Mike references and works off this source.
Mike's post is about the ideas of John Berger.The ideas are familar from previous posts. He argues that from the seventeenth century, paintings of female nudes reflected the woman’s submission to the owner of both woman and painting. Berger noted that "almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal - either literally or metaphorically - because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it."
Mike says that this male gaze continues today. In advertising males gaze, and females are gazed at. In ads addressed to women and female models "treat the lens as a substitute for the eye of an imaginary male onlooker. So when women look at these ads, they are actually seeing themselves as a man might see them.''
What happens when the camera as the instrument of the male gaze is turned on the male spectator?
We enter the world of Pierre Molinier.
Pierre Molinier, Travesti (with corset and nylons), manipulated self portrait, 1969
Molinier's working methods involved Surrealist inspired portraits and montaged images composed of favorite body parts. His stylized thematic preoccupations were an exploration of sex exclusively his own sex and sexual fantasies.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 18, 2004 11:43 PM | TrackBackJust proforma, to clear self from any plagiarist claims:
I didn't actually write anything in said post - the material was quoted from Chandler in the cited source.
(Suppose that merely quoting the source with quotation marks isn't good enough on the web, ;-))
Anyway, more later...
Posted by: mike on March 19, 2004 03:04 AMMike,
I was very tired when I wrote the post. I saw the quotation marks---I thought they were from Berger and dother authors not Chandler.
I had only read bits of Chandler for my posts. Not the Berger article.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on March 19, 2004 12:45 PMso gary . . . I have signed books by molinier.
he did so much to open me up to suburban dreaming.
I mean I wanted to bake my cock and balls in clay from the time I realised (mine) they were vulgar instruments of the devil.
Creating graphics on the baked case opened me up to marks like tattoos and home embroidery . . .
thanks for links into the dead mans memory!