Understanding The Female Gaze in Media
Female gaze this, female gaze that. The term ‘female gaze’ has been spiraling around and the term itself has received an increase of interest in 2021. This phenomenon started as a general discussion of interest on social media, in this case, Tiktok and Twitter, especially by cinephiles, book lovers, basically people who love to spend their time consuming the media.
According to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, there is in fact a portrayal of men and women in visual perception that produces different “gazes”. We have to date back to the cinema industry in Hollywood which tends to manipulate its visual pleasures by digesting it according to the prevailing patriarchal system. But why does the ‘gaze’ exist? Pleasures, however we define it, have different kinds of forms and one of them is scopophilia. Scopophilia is an occurrence in which we find pleasures in looking, and vice versa, by being looked at. This occurrence can be associated with seeing people as objects (Freud, 1905).
The female gaze itself, by definition, serves as a feminist alteration of the male gaze. The male gaze, is a term that was brought up as a phenomenon by Laura Mulvey in her essay Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema and was elaborated in a cinematic context which implies the way women are portrayed in films from the viewpoint of film directors — in most cases, cis-heterosexual men. It is really important to realize that this phenomenon is not limited to the world of cinema:
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 fantasy onto the female figure 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 leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. (Mulvey 11)
Based on the discussion observed on the internet and social media, people refer to the female gaze in a circumstance where the form of media is written, directed or created by women or in a feminine perspective. This can also be found in books, such as, Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen.
The female gaze has reversed the traditional relationship between gender, seen as an empowering movement, made the industry and the market recognize women as the go-getter of media consumption and brought satisfaction through its narratives and portrayals that relatively exceeded women’s expectation. However, the female gaze can take a wrong turn in its manifestations.
The female gaze made women as the “bearer of the look” and it has also made men — in this case — mostly male celebrities in a passive position in which we have to remind ourselves that we can’t use the female gaze to justify the sexualizing of men.
So, does the female gaze could really change the world and become one of the new feminist revolution?
References:
Mulvey L. (1989) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In: Visual and Other Pleasures. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19798-9_3
Boles, J. K. (1996). Historical dictionary of feminism (J. K. Boles & D. L. Hoeveler, Eds.). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Jacobsson, E.-M. (1999). ”A Female Gaze?”.https://cid.nada.kth.se/pdf/cid_51.pdf.
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. London, England: BBC Books.
Freud, S. (1962). Three essays on theory of sexuality (J. Strachey, Trans.). London, England: Chatto & Windus.
Li, X. (2020). How powerful is the female gaze? The implication of using male celebrities for promoting female cosmetics in China. Global Media and China, 205943641989916.
