Between Gazes
Camelia Elias
aims and focus
 look at:
how gender is a performative and constitutive
act within cultural frameworks
issues of representation, visual pleasure,
spectatorship and subjectivity
feminist, queers and ‘other’s own aims:
to end male, heterosexual, and white male/female
domination respectively
central theoretical questions
 what constitutes the category of woman?
 on what basis is it established that the
heterosexual world is more ‘natural’ than
the homosexual world?
 what legitimizes the marginalization of
transgender behavior?
 why does transgressing boundaries (both
literally and figuratively) end in
punishment?
central analytical questions
 how are women, queer, and the powerless
rest represented and constructed in
mainstream/art/cult films?
 what is the function and consequence of
these representations in the social and
cultural context?
 what kind of subject position does film
construe and represent for the viewer?
genders
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gender identity (after ’45)
gender roles (60s)
gender-gap
gender-biased
gender-specific
gender-bender (80s)
gender-blender
gender studies
gender differentiations
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male
female
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between male and female
beyond male and female
both male and female
neither male nor female
sex vs. gender discourse
 sex is filtered through the culturally dominant
codes that regulate the behavior acceptable in
men and women
 these codes police the social relations of
sexuality
 the codes determine the social division between
sexes
 men and women are placed in mutually
exclusive categories (Gayle Rubin)
 “sex is sex but what counts as sex is… culturally
determined and obtained” (Rubin)
Judith Butler
 a man is not what one is
but something one does,
a condition one enacts
 your gender is created by
your acts
 you become a man or a
woman by repeated acts
 repeated acts depend on
social convention
Butler’s claims
 sexual identities are a function of
representations
 representations preexist and define, as
well as complicate and disrupt, sexual
identities
 gender is not a stable identity, but an
identity constituted in time through stylized
repetition of acts
 the body is a set of possibilities
The gaze
 the gaze:
 is a mode of viewing reflecting a gendered code of
desire
 the look:
 a perceptual mode open to all
 “to gaze implies more than to look at - it signifies
a psychological relationship of power, in which
the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze”
(Jonathan Schroeder 1998, 208).
Gaze typology
 the spectator’s gaze: the gaze of the viewer at an image
of a person (or animal, or object) in the text;
 the intra-diegetic gaze: a gaze of one depicted person at
another within the world of the text
 the direct [or extra-diegetic] address to the viewer: the
gaze of a person (or quasi-human being) depicted in the
text looking ‘out of the frame’
 the look of the camera - the way that the camera itself
appears to look at the people depicted; less
metaphorically, the gaze of the film-maker or
photographer
gaze typology 2
 the gaze of a bystander - outside the world of the text 
the text may be erotic (Willemen 1992)
 the averted gaze - a depicted person’s noticeable
avoidance of the gaze of another  this may involve
looking up, looking down or looking away (Dyer 1982)
 the gaze of an audience within the text  shots of an
audience watching those performing in the 'text within a
text'
 the editorial gaze - 'the whole institutional process by
which some portion of the photographer's gaze is
chosen for use and emphasis' (Lutz & Collins 1994, 368)
Gaze typology in figurative painting
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You, looking at the painting,
figures in the painting who look out at you,
figures in the painting who look at one another, and
figures in the painting who look at objects or stare off into space
or have their eyes closed. In addition there is often
the museum guard, who may be looking at the back of your head,
and
the other people in the gallery, who may be looking at you or at
the painting. There are imaginary observers, too:
the artist, who was once looking at this painting,
the models for the figures in the painting, who may once have
seen themselves there, and
all the other people who have seen the painting - the buyers, the
museum officials, and so forth. And finally, there are also
people who have never seen the painting: they may know it only
from reproductions... or from descriptions. (J. Elkin, 1996: 38-39)
 Where the female model typically averts her eyes, expressing
modesty, patience and a lack of interest in anything else, the male
model looks either off or up. In the case of the former, his look
suggests an interest in something else that the viewer cannot see - it
certainly doesn’t suggest any interest in the viewer. Indeed, it barely
acknowledges the viewer, whereas the woman’s averted eyes do
just that - they are averted from the viewer.
 In the cases where the model is looking up, this always suggests a
spirituality...: he might be there for his face and body to be gazed at,
but his mind is on higher things, and it is this upward striving that is
most supposed to please... It may be, as is often said, that male pinups more often than not do not look at the viewer, but it is by no
means the case that they never do. When they do, what is crucial is
the kind of look that it is, something very often determined by the set
of the mouth that accompanies it. When the female pin-up returns
the viewer’s gaze, it is usually some kind of smile, inviting. The male
pin-up, even at his most benign, still stares at the viewer... Since
Freud, it is common to describe such a look as ‘castrating’ or
‘penetrating’... (Dyer 1992a, 104-9)
The 50s pin-ups
The gaze in film
men as subjects identifying with agents who
drive the film's narrative forward
women as objects for masculine desire and
fetishistic gazing (Mulvey, 1975)
1. wave feminism
 V. Woolf: “A Room of One’s Own”
socio-historical condition
 Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex
sex/gender distinction
2.wave feminism
 French feminism vs. North American
liberal feminism
 focus on sexual difference and women’s
experience:
biology
experience,
discourse,
the unconscious,
social and economic conditions
3. wave feminism
 pluralism
 questions the validity and relevance of white
middle class feminist discourse for different
ethnic and racial groups
 “English feminist criticism, especially Marxist stresses
oppression; French feminist criticism, essentially
psychoanalytic, stresses repression; American
feminist criticism, essentially textual, stresses
expression” (Showalter)
feminist film theory
 GOALS:
 to disempower film’s powerful misfiguring
of the female (Humm)
 to appropriate the power of dominant
images
 deconstruct the dichotomy:
man as subjects identifying with agents
women as objects for masculine desire
concerns
 the spectator/screen relationship
 processes of identification and pleasure in
film
 the relationship between narrative and
desire
gaze theory
1. the camera, operated by men looking at
women as objects
2. the look of male actors within the film
3. the gaze of the spectator (male)
Men act, and women appear
assumptions
 gender is a social construction that
oppresses women more than men
 patriarchy fashions these constructions
 women’s experiential knowledge helps us
to envision a non-sexist society
new trends
Annette Kuhn: ‘Women’s Genres’
 considers context as well as text
 considers the social audience as well as
the textual spectator
 moves the emphasis from the text to
culture
 emphasizes pluralistic approaches
emotion and the arts
 traditional aesthetics: focus is on
disinterested pleasure
 psychoanalytic theories of emotion:
emotion is a matter of the unconscious
 feminist aesthetics:
perception and appreciation do not have a
single standpoint  the viewer’s dynamics
the dynamics of the viewer
 active, not just passive
 cognizing, not just reacting
 critical, not just absorbing
feminist influences
 liberal feminism
 socialist feminism / feminism in cultural
studies
 postmodern feminism
 postfeminism
Sunday in New York
representations
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isolated
glamorous
on display
sexualized
to-be-looked-at-ness (Mulvey)
close-ups
 destroy the illusion of depth
 create flatness
 create icons rather than verisimilitude
POINT: the body is a function of discourse
man-handled
lessons in morality
 “a man deserves the right to make a
choice”
 “morality never changes”
 “the pendulum always swings back”
identifications
mirrors
 “As the narrative progresses she falls in love
with the male protagonist and becomes his
property, losing her outward glamorous
characteristics, her generalized sexuality, her
show-girl connotations; her eroticism is
subjected to the male star alone. By means of
identification with him, through participation in
his power, the spectator can indirectly possess
her to” (Mulvey)