Rethinking the Gaze: Problems of apparatus, class, gender, sexuality and race

1. Rethinking the Gaze: Problems of apparatus, class, gender, sexuality and race By:Jason Grant McKahan Presentation by:Brian Ambrose

2. Purpose of this Discussion • To gain a clear understanding of Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory. • To problematize gaze theory in its relation to the apparatus, class, gender, sexuality, and race

3. Class Outline • Mulvey and the gaze theory (4 minutes) • Rethinking apparatus, class, and gender (6 minutes) • Exciting film clips (5 minutes) • Rethinking sexuality and race (5 minutes) • Conclusion (2 minutes) • Review and Guided Questions (3minutes)

4. Laura Mulvey and the Gaze Theory • “Normal” subject formation • Interpellates subjects as “masculine” subjects

5. Gaze Theory • Notion of a single, unitary, masculine spectator • Humanistic, masculine, heterosexual, middle-class, white male

6. Apparatus • Mulvey’s arguments have become accepted practice for feminist and ideological groups • Spectators as subjects and cinema as apparatus • “Phallocentricism”

7. Rethinking the Apparatus • Neutral access to objective truth of the world • “Vision can be seen as a subjective and complex phenomenon vulnerable to misperception”

8. Rethinking the Apparatus (con’t) • Muybridge’s zooproxiscopic films of the 1870’s • Animal locomotion • “Human bodies” in motion!

9. The “Class” Conflict • Stuart Hall~universalistic tendency of all subjects • Marxist materialism and psychoanalytic theory are totally incongruent • We mistake our specific Western, late capitalist class conditions for reflections of “human” nature and psychology • One “way of seeing”

10. The “Class” Conflict (con’t) • Capitalist Hollywood • Vision, desire, and subjectivity are constructed within a sex/gender class system

11. Rethinking Gender • Can psychoanalysis provide any useful examination of women?

12. Rethinking Gender Main Points • Freud’s disregard for women • Identification of women who were faced with an active and strong protagonist • “phantasy of masculinization” • Teresa de Lauretis- “…always a movement, a subject process, a relation…” • Mary Ann Doe- “she is the image”

13. Spectatorship For a Female is a Game • Female protagonist becomes controller of the look • Female protagonist can masquerade the feminine by embodying the feminine in excess

14. Relevant Films

15. Sexuality at a “Gaze” • Gender and sexuality need to be seen as separate categories

16. Pleasures for female spectators in which identification and desire intersect • Female protagonist as the ideal woman • A desire for a woman on screen • Woman as active bearer of the look

17. A closer look at race • Racial formation not taken into account • The gaze of non-whites has always been explicitly political

18. Gaze theory and non-white female spectators • Non-white females absent compared to white females • Asexual servants who were to enhance the desirability of the white women • Ex:Tillie

19. Conclusion • Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory is in need of modernization • Modification must continuously be made to her theory to keep up with the changing world around us!

20. Guided Questions The notion of a single, unitary, masculine, spectator is often called _____ _______. Human body, gaze theory,Freudian fetishism

21. Guided Questions According to Mulvey, women were seen as passive and fetishized objects for an active male subject’s gaze? T/F

22. Discussion/Review Question Which problem discussed (apparatus, class, gender, sexuality, or race) do you find most significant in the clarification of the gaze theory?

23. Questions