Male Gaze and Uses & Gratification
Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze Theory
Male Gaze: Women are typically the objects of gaze because the control of the camera (and thus the gaze) comes from factors such as the assumption of heterosexual men as the default target audience. This doesn’t necessarily change with a female target audience as we’ve been taught to think and process this way. The camera acts like the man’s eyes often lingering on the body of the women.
Feminists think of the representation of people in three ways: how men look at women, how women look at themselves, how women look at each other. The assumption is that representations are always constructed from a male heterosexual point of view.
“Male Gaze” coined by Mulvey in 1975, identifying several key features of media: the camera lingers on the curves of the female body; events which occur to women are depicted in relation to how men react to them…
Traditional films present men as controlling subjects and treat women as objects of desire for men in both story and audience. Men look, women are looked that. Mulvey argues that media features facilitate the conditions for objectification.
2 Modes of looking for the film spectator: voyeuristic and fetishistic
Voyeuristic looking involves a controlling gaze and Mulvey argues that this has associations with sadism: “pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt – asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness” (-Mulvey 1992)
Fetishistic looking involves “the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous. This builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself”. Fetishistic looking, she suggests, leads to overvaluation of the female image and to the cult of the female movie star.
Uses and Gratifications Theory
How the audience uses the media to get specific gratifications or pleasure.
Audience are not helpless victims, they use media to meet their various needs. Media is ‘run’ by the audience – producers compete to satisfy audience demands. Media has no control over the way the audience may read/use the media.
4 Elements of uses/pleasures: Surveillance – information which could be useful for living/understanding the world around them; Personal Identity – finding yourself relating to texts; Personal Relationships – using the media for emotional and social interaction; Diversion – escape from everyday problems and routine
