Exam prep

What Is the Male Gaze?


The male gaze describes a way of portraying and looking at women that empowers men while sexualizing and diminishing women. While biologically, from early adolescence on, we are driven to look at and evaluate each other as potential mates, the male gaze twists this natural urge, turning the women into passive items to possess and use as props.

Laura Mulvey-

British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey described the concept of the “male gaze” in her 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which was published in 1975 in the film theory magazine Screen.4 In the article, Mulvey, who is a professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London, explained the way that mainstream media objectifies women, showing the female body through a heterosexual male lens as a passive non-actor secondary to the active male characters.

john berger-

John Peter Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to the BBC series of the same name, is often used as a university text. He lived in France for over fifty years.

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