March 21, 2004
Different ways of looking?
In looking back over the recent postings on the male gaze I can that they do two things.
They initiate, or enable, a break with the assumption in aesthetics that an aesthetic look is a neutral, distanced, disinterested mode of perception. This gives us a critical distance from Anglo-American aesthetics. The male is interested and connected to power and mastery.
They also indicate the possibilities of other kinds of looking to the male gaze. The possibilities here could be an oppositional one, in which there is a self-consciousness about the embeddedness of gender within one's gaze, especially an awareness of the way in which masculinty and power determines the visual construction of sexuality.
Another possibility is a woman centred way of looking that is a pro-active, self-conscious, interested form of looking:
Tamara de Lempika, the rhythm
Thus we have a particularly female look or gaze that might give rise to a particularly feminine sort of pleasure.
This leads away from Laura Mulvey's classic essay entitled, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,"which presupposed that women gaze at women in films as men do. Women viewing women as erotic objects on view for the pleasure of heterosexual males as potential possessions of males, and as objects of male fantasies and desires.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 21, 2004 12:31 PM | TrackBack