Male Gaze and Racism — Page 4:
16 Steve Neale identified the gaze in Hollywood films not primarily as male, but primarily as heterosexual. Even if in a heterosexist patriarchal society the homoerotic gaze has to be legitimized specifically, by making a male body only implicitly the object of a homosexual gaze regime, the presence of the gay gaze could not be denied. (281) Neale delivered a queer-theory reading of movies, by showing, how the gaze regime in films could alternate between male and female protagonists.
17 Subsequently, the theory of queer viewing was then developed by Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman. Both Neale as well as Richard Dyer criticized the idea that the man would never be sexually reified in mainstream cinema. The man would not always be the observer, who exercised control over the gaze. Since the 1980s, one could also observe an increasing representation and sexualization of the male body in film and television. (Moore, Evans & Gamman, Mort, Edwards)
In some ways, one could say that the difference between seeing and being seen — has overlaid, perhaps even usurped gender differences. Masculinity is defined through gaze, femininity identified by to be-looked-at-ness. It is certainly important to note that this defining power of the gaze is not limited to heterosexual relations (just as it does not automatically occur in every heterosexual relationship). It also characterizes the correlation of same-sex relationships. The key is the recognition that the viewer, because of the way in which the mechanical eye penetrates the object, is thought as a male and the looked-at object is perceived as a femaleand that this form of perception moves across gender boundaries and the self-perception of the individual. (Brown 9, my translation, N.F.)
18 Jacques Lacan had shown that the subjugation under the regime of being seen pertains to all subjects, if perhaps not equally. We all — in order to be considered as subjects — need to be seen from the outside:
I must, for the beginning, insist on one point there — on the field of vision the gaze is outside, I am being gazed at, which means I am picture / tableau. This is the function, by which the institution of the subject as the visible can be most deeply grasped. Basically the exterior gaze determines me within the visible. By the gaze I am enter the light, and by the gaze I partake in the effect of the gaze. It shows that the gaze constitutes the instrument through which the light embodies itself, and it is for this reason that I am (. . . ) photographed. (113, emphasis in the original)
For Lacan vision has clearly a chiasmatic or crossed nature: the way that the gaze proceeds from the subject and also to the subject from "outside" (106; McGowan).
19 In her reading of Lacan film theoretician Kaja Silverman addresses his separation of sight/regime/gaze/le regard and look, meaning the embodied, interwoven in desire l'oeil/eye and shows that the voyeuristic, male objectifying gaze only supposedly coincides with the gaze regime: "[A]ll binarisations of spectator and spectacle mystify the scopic relations in which we are held" (Male Subjectivity
(to) denaturalize the alignment of masculinity with the gaze. (. . . ) What must be demonstrated over and over again is that all subjects, male or female, rely for their identity upon the repertoire of culturally available images, and upon a gaze which, radically exceeding the libidinally vulnerable look, is not theirs to deploy. (153)
20 According to Silverman, no subject is actually and fully in a position to adopt the gaze, it can only be staged as if. Between the gaze regime and the eye (seeing) Lacan puts an intermediary body: the screen. Silverman defines the screen as a culturally generated image repertoire in the shape of the camera. This image repertoire is unique in each of us, "similar to the language", it provides us with "presentation parameters"(Blickregime 58), that structure of our perception, they determine "what and how the members of our culture perceive — how they process the visible and the importance they give it" (58). The subject is not the center or the origin of visual perception; it is, to the contrary, determined by the visual codes of a culture. (Mathes 99).