Debunking the Theory of 'The Male Gaze'

 

 There are many different ways of experiencing a figurative work of art in a gallery. Each time we stand in front of a picture there are many perspectives and sightlines crisscrossing around us, linking us subliminally and opening psychological ‘wormholes’ that connect us to others across history. According to James Elkins we may be aware of the following when considering a painting: there are the figures in the painting who look out at us; there may be other figures in the painting who look at other figures, or objects, or stare off into space, or have their eyes closed; there is the museum guard, who may be looking us as we look at the picture; there are the other people in the gallery who may be looking at us or at the painting we look at. And then there are also subliminal, ‘imaginary’ viewers: the artist who once stood in front of the painting, looking at it; the models for the figures in the painting, who once also saw themselves depicted there; and then there are the owners, collectors, and museum staff, who have beheld the picture throughout history.[1] Such a rich interwoven tapestry of readings, meanings, understandings, and assumptions is part of the joy we experience whenever we contemplate any work of art we look at. It is a shifting, fluid experience and we are free to drift at will, in and out of consciousness of it. We will be aware of some or all of the above criteria in our coming to an understanding of the work. However, for four decades we have been labouring under the theory that an image is looked at in one way only, and that the subject of this looking universally receives that gaze in one way, also.

In the last several decades it has been predominantly within film theory that issues surrounding gender and sexuality have been most strenuously debated, rather than art history, which has been fairly late to address the interrelationship of art, gender, and sexuality.

 In an essay on cinema, first published in 1975, in which she distilled certain ideas from Freud and Lacan, Laura Mulvey introduced the theory of ‘the male gaze’. This has found widespread and, until quite recently, unchallenged application as a way of understanding the fundamental modus operandi of cinema. For better or worse, the theory has also impacted on ideas about the ways in which we view art. Three years earlier, in Ways of Seeing, John Berger had put forward the same view, speaking of art from the Renaissance to the present: men look at women, and ‘women watch themselves being looked at.’[2] But the central observation that within patriarchal society ‘pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’ fails to address the numerous other factors that exist outside of this rigidly heteronormative perspective.[3] On women adopting an active, commanding role within a film, Mulvey prevaricates: ‘There are films with a woman as main protagonist, of course… [but] to analyse this phenomenon seriously here would take me too far afield'.[4] When pressed on this, Mulvey later wrote that her article was meant to be a manifesto rather than a reasoned academic text that took all variations into account. But by then it had become almost the gospel of art/cinema analysis.

 The notion that the gaze is always masculine and the object is always feminine is particularly problematic when applied to a homosexual or homosocial subject matter, or when subjected to a queer reading. Within this particular context the only possible application of the theory is by the automatic ‘feminisation’ of the male subject/object, who passively acquiesces to the drift of our attentive, penetrating gaze: but this is hardly, in fact, a necessary or accurate basis for an evaluation of an image.

 According to Michael Hatt, the theory of the male gaze is now an anachronistic and ‘historically and theoretically untenable simplistic notion, since its insistence on heterosexualising any visual exchange is implicitly – and at times explicitly – homophobic’.[5] The theory of the male gaze does not for instance countenance the possibility of male/male desire, and it has nothing to say about the responses of a male viewer to a male subject, except that: ‘Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionistic like’.[6] And, here, once again, Mulvey takes for granted that the ‘man’ doing the gazing is heterosexual, as if there were no other kind. The notion reiterates, reinforces, and ‘normalises’ any responses a male may be expected to have in relation to images of other males. This obviously runs counter to the homosexual experience, any one of whom, individually, may be only too pleased to ‘gaze at his exhibitionistic like’. And even if, under the weight of heteronormativity, this gay gaze has often to be surreptitious, it simply must not be written out of the equation.

 Burgess’s and Mulvey’s theories were propounded in a period where homosexuality - not to mention other subtle inter-relationships between males – was not seen as an area of discourse; it was presupposed that the historical viewer/beholder of a work of art was male, heterosexual, above the age of puberty, and white: their hypotheses are rooted in a privileged, colonialist world view, the primacy of which they did not question.

It is indisputable that there are countless thousands of half-naked or fully naked women depicted throughout western art history, and yes, they have been so depicted predominantly for the delectation of the invariably heterosexual male viewer/owner of the picture. These works have stood as a reminder of women’s place in society and of their historical powerlessness and their status as subservient objects of lust and the target of heterosexual male concupiscence. The sheer weight of example makes this undeniable. However, it would be more accurate to say that ‘the gaze’ within cinema, and art history, is heteronormative and heterosexist in the way in which it presents the heterosexual, self-limiting, structuring ‘norm’. But, apart from this, there have always been available to us other ways to view works of art which fall outside the existing historical heterosexist paradigm, which offer a broader experience and understanding. One such view, for instance, was posited by Michel Foucault, who wrote of the ‘inspecting gaze’, which is essentially a gaze that gathers the visual ‘knowledge’ of the object/subject. For Foucault, knowledge is aligned to power and so this gaze is an empowering, ‘fact-finding’ gaze: but it is not gender-specific, it is available to all genders and all sexualities.[7]

 We are all subject to the inspecting gaze of others, not the least of which when we are depicted within works of art; and we are all necessarily something other than, or more than ‘ourselves’ under this scrutiny. The beholding gaze that scrutinises us may be that of male, female, old, young, gay, straight, etc, and each viewer will perceive the subject/object via the particular hard-wiring of his or her own experiences and psychology, and during this process they will accrete other potential ‘meanings’ onto the original, essential body, which will be coloured and shaped by their own experiences, none of which are more ‘real’ or accurate than those assumed by the subject/object himself. In this regard the object/subject can be said to be a nebulous entity which awaits the consolidating ‘transfiguring’ gaze of the viewer to complete it, within the viewer’s imagination.

 It must surely be admissible that when we view a film, or look at a work of art, we are able to empathise with the human story displayed, independent of whether we are of the same gender or sexuality as the subject, and independent of whether we are of the same gender or sexuality as the artist who created the work? At any given moment the ‘gender’ of our gaze can flip between male, female, straight and gay and anything in between. And, in any event, our reading and understanding of a subject may change from moment to moment, as we look at it, or it may be contradictory, unfocused, or fragmentary; or we may find that we sometimes identify with the depicted or implied experiences within the work, rather than the object/subject. We are adept at extending our human compassion and understanding and we are surely capable of empathising and identifying with other genders and other sexualities which are displayed for our contemplation. This is an essential human attribute which is not to be so easily regulated out of our experience of cinema, or art, by such rigid strictures as the male gaze theory. There is no reason to suppose that our empathic qualities have not always existed, however much subsumed within the sociopolitical and sociological tenets of various historical periods. It has, moreover, become even more ‘permissible’ in the last few decades to exercise this empathy, due to a greater awareness and a greater acceptance of both our differences and our similarities to the subjects/objects depicted, in both the high and the low arts.

 Mulvey’s theory insists that an observed subject automatically assumes a ‘female’ passivity simply by receiving the penetrating, phallic, ‘male’ gaze of the spectator: but this view demands that we take on the heterosexist assumption that ‘female’ is intrinsically and fundamentally passive in the first place. Her assertion that, ‘A male [subject’s] characteristics are…not those of the erotic object of the gaze’ due to his ‘more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego’: but this precludes a gay appreciation or understanding of the subject, and it denies a whole raft of subtle (and not so subtle) homosocial and homosexual distinctions and interpretations, any, or all of which we may choose to apply in its place.

 

 

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[1] James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1996, pp. 38-39.

    [2] John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London, Penguin, p. 45.

[3] Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Visual and Other Pleasures, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 27.

   [4] Quoted in Amelia Jones ed., The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, Routledge, 2002, p. 49.

   [5] Michael Hatt, ‘Exposure Time’, Oxford Journal, 17:2, 1994, p. 135.

   [6] Jones, p. 49.

   [7] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison. New York, Pantheon, 1977.