representation

the male gaze- is the perspective of a heterosexual man and how it creates a feeling of empowerment of men objectifying and sexualising women in video games and other forms of media.

Laura Mulvey- is a creator who created the idea of the male gaze and exposing game creators for sexualising women and making the assumption that all men who play the game wants to see the woman’s butt per say.

John Berger- The voice actor for both Archie and Albert Crisp in the video game Grande Theft Auto: London 1969

“Men act and women appear. 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. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.”

John Berger sight of seeing

This shows how men overly sexualised woman and treat them like objects. The male gaze shows how video games have an influence on how we act today and how women get treated due to being sexualised in videogames.

QUOTES

why diversity matters:

“The industry traditionally projects an image that is young, white, straight and male.”

“We aim to provide a welcoming and safe space for everyone who attends, to experiment with costume, gender and sexuality, and know that they will not only not be judged, but entirely supported and celebrated.” – xbox

LEVELLING UP

“Latinx characters have often been portrayed as gangbangers and drug dealers, as seen in the Grand Theft Auto franchise, with ridiculous, cliched gang names like “The Cholos” and “The Cubans,” voiced in exaggerated, stereotypical Hispanic accents”

“Worse still are the portrayals of Muslim/Arab/Middle Eastern people, who are often relegated to the role of terrorist.”

VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA

“The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking”

“ultimately the meaning of women is sexual difference”

FEMINIST FREQUENCT SITE

Representation

The male gaze – Laura Mulvey and John Berger

This is a key idea of feminist film theory, which visual media believed that men tends to sexualise women for a male viewer. The male gaze theory is when women in the media are portrayed from the eyes of a heterosexual man and that these women are represented as passive objects of male desire. This suggests that the female viewer must experience the narrative secondarily, with the male. John Berger observed that by no means been overcome, men act and woman appear. Men look at women and women watch themselves being looked at.

Quotes

  1. “It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it.”
  2. “Woman’s desire is subjugated to her image (…) as bearer, not maker, of meaning.”
  3. “In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.”
  4. ” I still see storytelling for men by men that is always reinforcing the male gaze
  5. “Sheer male interest filled his gaze which was entirely focused on her. She’d never before felt so female, so utterly desirable, so wanton.”
  6. “The “male gaze,” as a shaper of my life’s choices, is largely incidental.”
  7. “There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.”
  8. “The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and, depending on who she is, throws her own gaze back out into the audience.”

Representaion – TASK 1

Laura Mulvey The “male gaze” is something that sexualises women by empowering men and objectifying women. In the “male gaze” the women is objectified to fit the wants of the heterosexual male.

John Berger – The book “ways of seeing” says in it that women from their earliest childhood have always had to survey themselves constantly. She is told that is it crucial on how she appears to men as it determines how successful she is in life.

8 pithy quotes:

Leveling up

As technology advanced, Black and other characters of color became more prevalent, even if most often confined to the fighting genre.

Despite many video game companies being based in East Asia, most games feature white protagonists.

Why diversity matters

Katie asked why it was important that Nintendo’s iconic plumber accompanied her on the ride. “Because he taught me to never give up,” her daughter said.

If you do not see yourself on Netflix, on Instagram, in games, in forums, where are you? Do you mean anything? It matters.

Laura Mulvey

At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim.

Male gaze

Laura Mulvey identifies the sexualisation of femininity and female characters compared to the male character that we identify with due to the lack of sexualisation and the addition of development and characteristics shown to deepen their character, in a lot of games and movies, Mulvey stated female characters are forced to identity with passive objects to be looked at and desired compared to men’s representation which is more focussed on how the characters body language reinforces the features they have- e.g. an assassin moving sneakily. She also has the idea that the majority of movie directors, game developers, big artists and key people in the media are men therefore we view media in a mans view hence the male gaze, an example would be in a film panning the camera on a sexualised female scene or in a media game exaggerations of female body parts overlooking how they’re actually meant to walk to show more depth to the character. This doesn’t mean male characters can’t be sexualised either- there’s just a stronger amount of female sexualisation- someone replaced popular oversexualised female poses with a boy doing it but that would still be viewing it in the male gaze. The male gaze supports the idea that a sexualised way of looking empowers men and sexualised women