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