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March 18, 2004
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.
previous start
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Just 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...