Male Gaze

The male gaze can be described as feminist reference to the voyeuristic way in which men look at women. It refers to the ways viwers look at images of people in any visual medium. "To gaze implies more than to look at. It signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze."

Forms of gaze

• The sepctators gaze
• The intra-diagetic gaze
• The direct address (or extra-diagetic) to the viewer.
• The look of the camera
• The gaze of a bystander
• The gaze of an audience within a text.

Direction og gaze:

Trever Millum distinguished between these forms of attention in his study of women in magazine advertisements.

• Attention directed towrads others.
• Attentionndirected towards an object.
• Attention directed towards oneself.
• Attention directed to the reader/camera.
• Attention directed into middle distnace.

Paul Messaris (1997) notes that traditionally, men do not look directly into the camera, although "during the past btwo decades... there has been a notable countertrend in male-oriented advertising, fetauring men whose poses contain some of the same elements....traditionally associated with women. This seems likely to indicate an explict concern about how men look in the eyes of women".

Paul Messaris (1997) notes that the female models in ads addressed to women, "treat the lens as a substitute for the eyes of women".

Laura Mulvey- The Male Gaze

• "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema" (1975)
• Active male/passive female.
• "Women as image"/"Man as bearer of the look"
• Voyeuristic
• Fetishistic

Critism's with Mulvey's theory.

• A failure to account for a female spectator
• Looks only at the spectator as being a heterosexual male.
• Since 1980's there has been an increasing display and sexualisation of the male body in mainstream cinema and televsion advertising.

Categorising facial expressions.