Whey Gaze

Every single adult has his or her own perspective of life, based on their culture, family, and childhood surroundings; witch actually frames his psychological conditions. This complex combination contributes a significant role in who he or she is, how they approach life, how they encounter others, and how they resent their selves in their world. It is feasible for a human being to be capable of refining what was interpreted above, although human being instincts and DNA is insurmountable to abstain.

C. Sections II. A and B have set out two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation. The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator's fascination with and recognition of his like. The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotomy was crucial for Freud. Although he saw the two as interacting and overlaying each other, the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation continues to be a dramatic polarisation in terms of pleasure.

III. Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look

A. In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire.

Laura Mulvey, "Visual and Other Pleasures and Narrative cinema" Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999: 833-44


Before modern Media there was the Internet, T.V., Radio, Newspapers, books, and paintings. There was the Bible and the Church, who were the ones who dictated and structured life and morals of society. As centuries revolved, progress revolutionized in many varieties, although “European Renaissance Men” still dominate our culture. As a result of all these circumstances, we presently have unmitigated rebounds, and antagonistic rebounds as well. And one of those antagonistic rebounds is Oppositional Gaze.

"When most black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy."

Bell Hooks,In Black Looks:Rase Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992

Bell Hooks in this book has her definition of the gaze. "When thinking about black female spectators, I remember being punished as a child for staring, for those hard intense direct looks children would give grownups, looks that were seen as confrontational, as gestures of resistance, challenges to authority." As a child, hooks explained that the attempts made to repress black people’s right to gaze only produces a staggering desire to look, "an oppositional gaze." "When black women did appear they were servants for white women, or they were forced to pass as white."

Representing woman in common Media is horrible. Women are drowning in the whirlpool of Modern Media, which empresses with shamefulness “Everything for sale”.

"In trying to understand the media’s objectification of women and how it makes us feel, it can help to think of the camera lens as a white male eye. Have you noticed that the covers of women’s and men’s magazines are almost always female? The female stars of mainstream movies and TV shows not only look sexy but often behave in the kind of subservient, helpless way that many men find appealing. The camera eye is usually focused on women who look and act in a way that pleases men; men look (active), and women receive their gaze (passive). The media’s gaze is essentially a male gaze. "

 Laura Mulvey, "Visual and Other Pleasures" 1989

The "portrayal of woman and her beauty in such a position offers up the pleasure for the male spectator".

"The male gaze is an active and empowering look directed towards the other; for our purposes of discussion this other is the inferior female gender. This gaze provides males with the feelings of entitlement and ownership which eventually lead to their objectification of women".

Berger, John, "Ways of Seeing" 1972.

It is each individual’s choice to accommodate its own surrounding, and you have the ability of your personal conversion. As an adult, accommodating your surroundings is possible by taking a risk, and if every adult undertakes, and attempts to change his personal life and actions, the whole society would converse. As we know from history, killing the “King” and triumphant the "King is dead. Long live the King" is not a solution for us. Switching power of dictators would not change surroundings. We’re not looking just for a replacement; we’re looking for alteration in Ideology. Acknowledging the existing issue, and descrying the source and the background history of the problem, is the first step to achieve accommodation. This is the why this class is inspirational, and is endorsing me. As a parent, at a family level, it is important that I pass the message to my child, as future generation.

The Feminist Movement: A History in Pictures
http://youtu.be/UsMolaBBAMI