gaze
gazeA term associated with Foucault's account of surveillance, referring to structured ways of seeing and interpreting the social world. Laura Mulvey introduced an influential theory of the gaze in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Screen magazine (1975). She argued that women are objectified and stereotyped on the screen because of the way cinema is structured around three male ways of looking—or ‘gazes’. First, the way the camera looks in any filmed situation is voyeuristic, as most films are made by men; second, there is the gaze of men within a particular film itself, which is structured to make women appear as objects of their gaze; third, there is the gaze of the actual male spectator. Mulvey's theory was much influenced by Jacques Lacan's ideas about psychoanalysis. It has become important in feminist art theory and it has since been argued there is a...
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