The Male Gaze

• In feminist theory the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male viewer

Kourtney Roy: Deconstructing the Male Gaze

Kourtney Roy is a photographer born in Northern Ontario in 1981. She produced a series titled ‘The Ideal Women’ in which Roy is both the objectifier and the object: the photographer and the ‘ideal woman’ photographed. In contrast to her use of bold aesthetics, Roy’s reference to the male gaze in The Ideal Women is subtle. This reflects her understanding of gender discrimination in both the photography industry and society at large, she reflects “Discriminatory behaviour has been so conditioned that we often accept it as natural, as opposed to learned behaviour”. For Roy the practice of celebrating female artists in relation to their womanhood epitomises this. She cites Georgia O’Keeffe, who famously “The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I am one of the best painters.”

Roy’s distinctive approach and aesthetic runs through all of her work, be it personal or commercial. The careful compositions, bold colours and immaculate hair and make-up, inspire each still with a cinematic air.

I feel I can look on and take inspiration from Roy and relate her work to mine as I also am aiming to show ideas of female representations and how they have been presented through time and the media in what could be seen as the male gaze especially for some of the recreations of that of Guess and even Balenciaga.

Women in Art

How Art has shaped female beauty ideals throughout history

• History provides us a record, and from it one basic, inescapable, truth stands out: the ideals women are asked to embody, regardless of culture or continent, have been hammered out almost exclusively by men. This fact, more than any sort of evolutionary determinism, has meant that a fairly narrow range of attributes resurfaces across eras, returning every couple of decades or so like a new strain of the flu.
• Physical ideals are changeable, manifestations of the cultures they come from, yet some aspects change more readily than others. Even when produced by those of their own gender, images of women have historically followed a pattern set down by males. Little about Artemisia Gentileschi’s Sleeping Venus(1625-1630), for example, suggests its female maker. In it, as in virtually all pictures of women, passivity is the norm, whether manifested as softness, slack musculature, or a deferential pose. Another abiding trait, the outline of the hourglass, reminds us that the Female is always a sort of clock, which we try to freeze at the moment of youth.

According to a story by Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer from the first century C.E, the first drawing ever made (and supposed the origin of painting) was by a women named Dibutades, who traced the silhouette of her lover on a wall. Whether chosen to be believed or not it is worth noting that although western mythology tells us that a woman was the first artist, her female successors received little attention until the end of the 20th Century. From antiquity onwards, only a few small sample of women found themselves into the tale of great artists. Even then, they were often described as unusually talented women who overcame the limitations of their gender in order to excel in what was known as a masculine field. British artist Mary Beale was a successful portrait artist in the late 1600’s but much of her success was attributed to the fact that her husband oversaw their studio and presented her works as experiments in the painting methods he developed.

Women have often been the subject of the art rather than the artist. In the modern Renaissance movements around the 1700’s women were often feature nude and very curvy and full, typically what the ideal was then.