The Male Gaze – This is the representation of women in video games or any form of media, over sexualising them for the male attention, this also presumes that the viewer/player is a straight male.
John Peter Berger – Is an English art critic who wrote the book “Ways of seeing” which introduced the idea of The Male Gaze to the world.
Laura Mulvey – Is a British film critic who focuses of the feministic views on the obvious male drive in films. She is most well known from her journal “Screen” where a specific essay speaks about the “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” which focuses on Johns idea of THE MALE GAZE within cinema.
Examples of the male gaze within films:
This comes from the Transformers film where, as you can see, they oversexualise the actor Megan Fox with the angle of the camera and her body language.
The male gaze: The term came about in 1975 by Laura Mulvey and how the media represents women in magazines , films and video games to make it more appealing to heterosexual males.
From wearing revealing clothes showing much skin as possible , camera angles and the way females move. The male gaze sexualises and objectifies the women’s body whilst when males are represented in media they are mainly covered for example video games will do their best to cover the males body and present him as a fearless warrior. Or at other times when they are shirtless it is representing them as strong and fearless.
Laura Mulvey: Laura Mulvey is a feminist best known for her media theory ‘The male gaze’ in one of her quotes “the gender power asymmetry is a controlling force in cinema and constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer, which is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideologies and discourses.”
Male Gaze– This is how viewers engage in visual media. “The Male Gaze” suggests a sexualised way of looking that empowers men and objectifies women. In the male gaze, women are visually positioned as an “object” for heterosexual male desire. Her feelings, thoughts and occupation are less important than the male desire.
Laura Mulvey- Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist, best known for for her essay “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” which was written in 1973 and published in 1975.she took inspiration from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan concepts in which she hopes to use as a “political weapon”. She uses this to argue that Hollywood inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire and “the male gaze”. According to Mulvey, women are coded with “to-be-looked-at-ness” and states that the camera positioning and the male viewer constituted the “bearer of the look”, meaning that women are purely there and with everything they do it is for a males pleasure.
John Berger- “Ways of Seeing” is a 1972 television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger. He begins by exploring the history of the female nude or the status of oil paint, his landmark series showed how art revealed the social and political systems in which it was made. He also examined what had changed in our ways of seeing in the time between when the art was made and today.”
Task 2:
Representation of POC in video games
“characters were often cast as caricatures, with exaggerated, grotesque features…”
“Latinx characters have often been portrayed as gangbangers and drug dealers”
“…most games feature white protagonists.”
“a scene in Pakistan displays shop signs written in Arabic, even though Pakistani people speak English and Urdu, not Arabic.”
Why diversity matters:
“I think we need to back away from this focus on one type of consumer or one type of developer”
“The industry traditionally projects an image that is young, white, straight and male”
Laura Mulvey- visual pleasure and narrative cinema:
1.”ultimately, the meaning of women is sexual difference.”
2. “the beauty of the woman as object as the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups is the content of the film.”
The male gaze refers to the sexualized interpretation of the gaze in a way that sexualizes/objectifies women and empowers men. In terms of the male gaze, women are often positioned as the object of a generally straight male desire- which is exactly what John Berger mentions in his book Ways of Seeing. Film theorist Laura Mulvey also theorises that most films and movies are filmed in ways that satisfy male voyeurism, which is the sexual pleasure derived chiefly from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity which is also known as scopophilia.
‘The Male Gaze’ is a feminist ideology that encapsulates the theory that female characters in visual arts and literature are often over-sexualised and presented solely as sexual objects for heterosexual male gratification from a masculine viewpoint (or gaze).
Laura Mulvey, a British feminist film critic, created the term ‘The Male Gaze’ is her 1973 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Mulvey studied at St Hilda’s College, Oxford and is now a professor at the University of London, specialising in Film and Media Studies. She uses the phycological idea of ‘Scopophilia’, meaning to have ‘aesthetic pleasure drawn from looking at an object or person’, as a basis for many of her theories.
John Berger was an English art critic who won the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel ‘G.’. He is most well known for his essay ‘Ways of Seeing’. This essay explores The Male Gaze in different ways and puts emphasis on the different ways in which male and female characters are depicted in the media.
Feminist film expert, Laura Mulvey, invented the concept of women being looked at in a very sexualised way by males in order to make them feel important and better about themselves, objectifying them. This is called The Male Gaze- the way in which men look at women in a sexualising way.
John Berger:
John Berger was an English Art Critic who wrote the famous essay ‘Ways of Seeing’. This essay includes ideas of the different ways men and women are represented in visual media, and Laura Mulvey’s concept of The Male Gaze.
“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.” – Ways of Seeing
The male gaze is an objectification of women. The ‘gaze’ is looked at as sexualising women and objectifying them and empowering men, not just in video games but in general media platforms. The game makers use women more as a sexual object used for appeal unlike male characters who are built to have a personality, talents and appropriate outfits. Women’s representation in games focuses more on their boobs and butt and outfit than their object which is to win the game.
Laura Mulvey, is a feminist who explains that most films are designed to visually pleasure masculine ‘scopophilia’. Scopophilia is the sexual pleasure in looking. Her concept is described as a heterosexual, masculine gaze. Mulvey explains that men are uninterested in women if not sexualised in some way, either in their outfits or exaggerated features, in video games and movies. She explains men feel power over women when they are venerable in media, by wearing sexualised outfits.
John Berger– He devised the theory of “Ways of seeing” suggesting that the way woman are seen by men and the way they are taught to see themselves is wrong and creates a bad relationship.
DEADLINE TO COMPLETE YOUR GAMES COVER IS TUESDAY 5th OCTOBER
Think about what you would produce as a video games box inlay product and write up the following in a new post (which is linked to the NEA assessment criteria – click on file link below to see how you will be assessed)
4. What kind of company would make your product? What kind of audience would consume it? (50-100 words)
Task 2:
Sketch out a design for your games cover on an A4 piece of paper. Take a photo of your sketch and upload this to your blog (essentially both task 1 and task 2 are your planning documents).
Task 3:
Create a DVD games box cover (back and front). The dimensions are 275 mm x 185 mm with a 300 dpi resolution (because this is essentially a print product). Include spine guides, the first at left is at 130 mm add a second guide to have a spine of 15 mm.
Task 4:
Please upload your finished product to the blog (as a JPEG) and print it out on a piece of A4 paper. Do this by the end of the week. Categorise your post as PRODUCTION.
If your JPEG is too big to upload then open up the file in Photoshop and reduce the file size. You can do that by selecting IMAGE > IMAGE SIZE and REDUCING THE BIGGEST NUMBER TO 1000 PIXELS.
Task 5:
Re-design your Game Cover / Inlay box card to produce a completely opposite representation of your product. So if it was reactionary, make it radical, if it was positive make it negative, if it was stereotypical make it countertypical. Please remember that we are a school – so don’t go too controversial – it would still need to be a recognisable media product that is aimed to sale.
Some advice for content
In other words, you are looking to change more than the surface of your product! At the heart of your product you are (RE)-PRESENTING A SET OF ATTITUDES, VALUES, BELIEFS (what is known as ideology), so your new product will be a complete reversal (or antithesis) of your first production.
In this way, we should be able to recognise that media products are a set of selected elements that construct an ideological representation of ( . . a thing, a group, a set of . . . for example: gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, regional identity, economic identity, global identity and / or ideas around key issues such as the environment, conflict, violence, space, morality, ethics etc etc etc)
Some advice for the process
I would suggest that you open up your old file and save it as a new file name. I would imagine that you will:
Change the colour scheme
Change the title
Change your main character
Adjust and change a couple of your screen grabs
When you have finished upload the JPEG copy to the blog (as we know PSD – photoshop files do not upload to the blog)
I will give you a mark out of 10.
5 points for completing the exercise.
5 points for each bullet point that shows the changes you have made.
The male gaze– How men objectify (view) women and sexualizing’s them as being less capable creating empowerment in men.
Laura Mulvey– She was the person who came up with the idea about the male gaze as they were many issues with gender in film and other media. She is a feminist and says that films are made in the view of a heterosexual men trying to reveal sexually attractive parts of a woman by camera angles, zoom-ins or other strategies.
John Berger– He devised the theory of “Ways of seeing” suggesting that the way woman are seen by men and the way they are taught to see themselves is wrong and creates a bad relationship.
Quotes
“52% of Hispanic people studied believed there was a link between violent video games and real-world violence.”
“This poor representation of Asian women perpetuates the stereotype that they are meek, submissive, sexual objects who exist purely for men’s entertainment.”
“new range of diverse player avatars, complete with wheelchairs, complete with a greater range of skin tones, complete with more expressive gender-agnostic clothing”
“It is isolating not to be thought of or considered in the culture you desperately want to consume and be part of.”
“women then stands in patriarchal couture as signifier for the male other”
“women displayed as a sexual object”
“Euthanised damsel- only solution is to kill damsel in order to protect her”
“Woman in refrigerator- women killed off to continue male story development and seek revenge”
The Male Gaze – the perspective of a notionally typical heterosexual man considered as embodied in the audience or intended audience for films and other visual media, characterized by a tendency to objectify or sexualize women. “it’s because of the male gaze that female characters are regularly eroticized.”
(Source – Oxford Languages)
Laura Mulvey– a filmmaker and theorist who created the term “the male gaze” in her 1973 paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.
John Berger– an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. In his book Ways of Seeing, Berger observed that ‘according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have no means been overcome – men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’.
