Male Gaze and Racism — Page 10:
Summary
46 Starting from a feminist interpretation of the male gaze regime in Hollywood, cinema studies and research in the humanities have advanced a privilegizing of the voyeuristic male gaze beyond the theoretical debate about the Hollywood film. The feminist theory debate has, however, modified the importance of the male gaze in the years after 1975 and has formulated certain applicatory conditions for its effective use. At the same time, feminist theory has shown that due to changes in conditions of production and reception men may also become the object of voyeuristic gaze. The inclusion of the texts by Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes has opened the possibility to assign subjectivity even to the gazed-at objects. The masculine look can be reverted, albeit not always as an equal. By concentrating on stills or drawings it can also be shown that besides the dominant racist discourse there is also a space for a more quiet discursive murmuring where the gaze regime does not demand submission, but grants the indigenous other the status of a subject.