Have we ruined the concept of the male gaze?
- 3shotcine
- Nov 30, 2024
- 4 min read
by Atlanta Tsiaoukkas, resident writer at 3shotcine
The internet is obsessed with the male gaze: a panopticon, the gaze follows us, but more so, online discourse about the gaze is endless. Every film released nowadays has its male gaze discourse, every online influencer has posted about being a man-repeller, and all media is evaluated by how much it caters to the male gaze. However, has this become an overused concept? Is it still useful when thinking about gender in cinema? Here, I’ll take you through what exactly the male gaze is, some of the problems with its use and ultimately leave it to you to decide - have we ruined the concept of the male gaze?
Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, first published in Screen in 1975, introduced the concept of the male gaze and presented the Hollywood camera as the penetrative arbitrator of the heterosexual male perspective that objectifies women’s bodies on screen. This theoretical framework for feminist approaches to film had such a significant influence on the field that it quickly spilt over into all other areas of cultural and visual studies, extending into popular use to the extent that most people nowadays have some idea of what is meant by the male gaze. Mulvey’s gaze also prompted the field of 'gaze theory’, identifying and naming several other gazes - colonialist, oppositional, ableist, white… there is always a gaze that structures our viewing pleasure. The gaze is Freudian and phallic, engaging in voyeuristic pleasures whilst those gazed upon are forced into the position of passive exhibitionists, performing for the gazer.
A key issue in the online use of the concept of the male gaze is that, whilst it was originally conceived as a way of thinking about characters and those behind a directorial camera, it is now being applied to real people. The gaze penetrates, but it cannot touch that which it gazes upon, whereas, when Julia Fox talks about not catering to the male gaze in her daily style choices, she is talking about real men who can, unfortunately, act on their viewing. Oftentimes, the women of cinema discussed through the lens of the male gaze are not only viewed but constructed towards masculinised pleasure, whereas real women have an escape route - effectively, real women can gaze back, complicating a straightforward reapplication of the male gaze to real-life dynamics. This dilutes the idea of the male gaze down to having long hair versus short hair, dressing weird like a 'man-repeller' or dressing like a bimbo. Whereas, in line with Mulvey's original work, the male gaze has much more to do with spectatorship and voyeurism than the extent to which women adhere to a gendered norm.
In the decades since the coining of the male gaze, efforts amongst feminist and female directors to subvert the male gaze have led to mixed results which suggest that the focus on the gaze isn't a productive practice to change the depiction of women in cinema. Take two popular ‘feminist’ films released this year: The Substance (Coralie Fargeat) and Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos). Both were praised for their feminist takes and also derided for the male gaze - even with this supposedly useful concept for thinking about film in a feminist way, the contestations as to whether the films cater to masculine pleasures indicate the gaze is ineffectual. And certainly, the male gaze is in these films, just look at how much of Margaret Qualley's body we see instead of her face in The Substance, and yet, this is also apparently a subversion, though it is doing the same thing an antifeminist type film would do, showing a young, attractive woman's body off at the cinema. It is often presumed that the male gaze is simply about the attractiveness and sexuality of the women depicted in film, but the gaze is a byword for more structural concerns of agency and spectatorship. The characters in these films are often powerless, lacking agency compared to the male counterparts around them, and continue narratives which frame women as dependent and selfish. More sex scenes that are ‘sex-positive’ or a female director displaying a female actor’s body does not necessarily address structural issues of misogyny that concepts like the male gaze were originally designed to assess, demonstrating how this concept has been diluted in popular culture.
Gaze theory is only one way to think about cinema, and just because it is widely known doesn't mean it's the best way. There are several reasons why it might fail us, even beyond questions of sex and gender. The gaze only responds to visual elements of a film, for example, whereas films are also auditory, spatial, and interactive experiences. Whilst Mulvey talks of film viewing as a 'hermetically sealed experience', this is increasingly an inaccurate description of people's viewing habits. Television studies offer as an alternative the 'glance' to reflect the interrupted flow of watching a TV show, and ideas of interruption and diffraction in viewing can open up new ways of thinking about film. Staying too loyal to one paradigm can discourage us from experimenting when engaging with films casually and critically, and the ubiquity of the male gaze as a concept may cause us to stagnate in our critical knowledge of visual culture.
The male gaze is undoubtedly a revolutionary theoretical concept, a polemical piece of critical work that changed film theory and the ways we think about gender on screen. It is still a valuable paradigm through which to think about gender and other traits and marginalised positionalities on screen. With that being said, its overwhelming use in popular and online discourses about film risks oversimplifying ideas about gender, misinterpreting the literature on the gaze and restricting our ability to creatively think about cinema. When deploying the male gaze, we should be careful to use it sparingly, precisely and intentionally to avoid contributing to the diluting of a critical concept.
An essay by Atlanta Tsiaoukkas, resident writer at 3shotcine.
Atlanta is a born and bred Londoner and a PhD candidate researching Victorian children’s culture. She enjoys exploring film and popular culture through a unique lens and understanding cinema within wider social contexts.
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