Rethinking the Gaze: Problems of apparatus, class, gender,

sexuality and race

By:Jason Grant McKahan

Presentation by:Brian Ambrose

Purpose of this Discussion

• To gain a clear understanding of Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory.

• To problematize gaze theory in its relation to the apparatus, class, gender, sexuality, and race

Class Outline

• Mulvey and the gaze theory (4 minutes)• Rethinking apparatus, class, and gender (6

minutes)• Exciting film clips (5 minutes)• Rethinking sexuality and race (5 minutes)• Conclusion (2 minutes)• Review and Guided Questions (3minutes)

Laura Mulvey and the Gaze Theory

• “Normal” subject formation

• Interpellates subjects as “masculine” subjects

Gaze Theory

• Notion of a single, unitary, masculine spectator

• Humanistic, masculine, heterosexual, middle-class, white male

Apparatus

• Mulvey’s arguments have become accepted practice for feminist and ideological groups

• Spectators as subjects and cinema as apparatus

• “Phallocentricism”

Rethinking the Apparatus

• Neutral access to objective truth of the world

• “Vision can be seen as a subjective and complex phenomenon vulnerable to misperception”

Rethinking the Apparatus (con’t)

• Muybridge’s zooproxiscopic films of the 1870’s

• Animal locomotion• “Human bodies” in motion!

The “Class” Conflict

• Stuart Hall~universalistic tendency of all subjects

• Marxist materialism and psychoanalytic theory are totally incongruent

• We mistake our specific Western, late capitalist class conditions for reflections of “human” nature and psychology

• One “way of seeing”

The “Class” Conflict (con’t)

• Capitalist Hollywood• Vision, desire, and subjectivity are

constructed within a sex/gender class system

Rethinking Gender

• Can psychoanalysis provide any useful examination of women?

Rethinking Gender Main Points

• Freud’s disregard for women• Identification of women who were faced

with an active and strong protagonist• “phantasy of masculinization” • Teresa de Lauretis- “…always a movement,

a subject process, a relation…”• Mary Ann Doe- “she is the image”

Spectatorship For a Female is a Game

• Female protagonist becomes controller of the look

• Female protagonist can masquerade the feminine by embodying the feminine in excess

Relevant Films

Sexuality at a “Gaze”

• Gender and sexuality need to be seen as separate categories

Pleasures for female spectators in which identification and desire intersect

• Female protagonist as the ideal woman

• A desire for a woman on screen

• Woman as active bearer of the look

A closer look at race

• Racial formation not taken into account• The gaze of non-whites has always been

explicitly political

Gaze theory and non-white female spectators

• Non-white females absent compared to white females

• Asexual servants who were to enhance the desirability of the white women

• Ex:Tillie

Conclusion

• Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory is in need of modernization

• Modification must continuously be made to her theory to keep up with the changing world around us!

Guided Questions

The notion of a single, unitary, masculine, spectator is often called _____ _______.

Human body, gaze theory,Freudian fetishism

Guided Questions

According to Mulvey, women were seen as passive and fetishized objects for an active male

subject’s gaze? T/F

Discussion/Review Question

Which problem discussed (apparatus, class, gender, sexuality, or race) do you find most significant in the clarification of the gaze theory?

Questions