Male Gaze and Racism
Introduction
1 I would like to present some considerations for a re-positioning of the concept of the male gaze that could lead to a decentering of this much-used construction. In a second move I will try to transfer these reflections onto the concept of racism, thereby aiming at a more thorough understanding of what intersectionality actually means.
2 My theoretical justification for this course of action is derived from the fact that practices and discourses that are linked intimately with sexisms on the one hand and with racisms on the other cannot be conceived of separately but must be thought of as interdependent. (Becker; McClintock)
3 1975 was a special year in the history of the concepts of the male gaze and racism, for it marks both the publication of Michel Foucault's seminal book Surveiller et Punir and the first printing of Laura Mulvey’s path-breaking essay on the male gaze in Hollywood cinema. (Foucault Surveiller/Discipline; Mulvey Visual) While it is the controlling gaze of the invisible prison guardian that receives attention in Foucault’s book, Mulvey focused on a critique of the male gaze of the camera in Hollywood produced movies. Whereas Foucault conceptualizes the gaze as a form of societal power at the brink of modernity, Mulvey perceived the male gaze as a means to present the female body as an object for a voyeuristic and sexist practice of the spectators.
Laura Mulvey
4 Mulvey’s short text can be summed up as follows: Hollywood movies fascinate through the narration of a coherent plot. From an explicitly psychoanalytic viewpoint, based on Freud’s "Three contributions to the Sexual Theory" Mulvey argues that that cinema provides visual pleasure through scopophilia and identification with the on-screen male actor. Mulvey argues that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding why film creates a space where women are viewed as sexual objects by men. According to Mulvey, the combination of the patriarchal order of society and looking as a pleasurable act (voyeurism) create film as an outlet for female sexual exploitation.
5 Voyeurism according to Freud is an aberration or perversion in comparison to a fully heterosexual identity. At the same time Freud insists that in voyeurism the sexual aim is present in an active and a passive form. (Freud) Following Freud, Mulvey breaks scopophilia down into an active part, which is always male, and a passive part, which is always female. Women are the objects that are looked at.