Oppressive Texts, Resisting Readers and the Gendered Spectator: The New Aesthetics

At the heart of recent feminist theorizing about art is the claim that various forms of representation-painting, photography, film-assume a "male gaze." The notion of the gaze has both a literal and a figurative component. Narrowly construed, it refers to actual looking. Broadly, or more metaphorically, it refers to a way of thinking about, and acting in, the world. In literal terms, the gaze is male when men do the looking. Men look both as spectators and as characters within works. In figurative terms, to say that the gaze is male refers to a way of seeing which takes women as its object. In this broad sense, the gaze is male whenever it directs itself at, and takes pleasure in, women, where women function as erotic objects. The feminist claim is that most art, most of the time, places women in this position. In Laura Mulvey's words, man is the bearer of the gaze, woman its object. ' Feminist theory, like many other theories, takes as one of its basic tenets that no vision, not even artistic vision, is neutral vision. All vision is colored by the "spectacles" through which we see the world. The notion that all seeing is "a way of seeing" contrasts sharply with the traditional realist assumption that observation can be cleanly separated from interpretation, at least under certain ideally specified conditions. In part, feminism can be understood as reiterating a familiar, but still important, objection to the naive notion of the innocent eye. As E.H. Gombrich convincingly argues, observation is never innocent. In his words, "whenever we receive a visual impression, we react by docketing it, filing it, grouping it in one way or another, even if the impression is only that of an inkblot or a fingerprint. ... [T]he postulate of an unbiased eye demands the impossible. "2 Observation is always conditioned by perspective and expectation. Yet, the feminist claim that our representations inscribe a male gaze involves more than a denial of the eye's innocence. It involves asserting the central role that gender plays in formulating those expectations. Feminism insists, moreover, that these expectations are disproportionately affected by male needs, beliefs and desires. Both men and women have learned to see the world through male eyes. So, for example, women throughout their lives expend enormous amounts of time and energy and money making themselves "beautiful." In undertaking this costly process, women judge themselves according to internalized standards of what is pleasing to men. As Sandra Bartly observes, adolescent girls "learn to appraise themselves as they are shortly to be appraised." In this sense, the eyes are female, but the gaze is male.3 Feminism objects to seeing the world "through male eyes." It equates the male gaze with patriarchy. Patriarchy defines a social system "marked by the supremacy of the father and the legal dependence of wives and children. "4 Under such a system, women depend not only for status and privilege, but for their very identity, upon men. The assumption is that this arrangement oppresses women. It also, as both feminist and non-feminists have argued, oppresses men, although not necessarily in the same way as it oppresses women. This oppression occurs at the symbolic as well as the material level. Women, as the first editorial of the film journal, Camera Obscura, announced, "are oppressed not only economically and politically, but also in the very forms of reasoning, signifying and symbolical exchange of our culture. "5 Thus, to take a familiar but powerful example, in English "he" functions as the unmarked term, "she" as the marked term.