Query: the male gaze

title: The Male Gaze in Visual Culture

title: Visual pleasure from motherhood: Alyssa Milano challenging the male gaze
abstract: Using male and female gaze theories as frameworks, this article analyzes the visual design and composition of four distinct breastfeeding (BF) photographs posted by Alyssa Milano to her Instagram in order to better understand the public's mixed responses of support and criticism. I argue that Milano borrows visual elements from the male gaze and combines them with feminine content in an attempt to (1) challenge the dominant, patriarchal norm of deriving pleasure from viewing sexualized women and (2) instead encourage an understanding of the maternal woman as visually pleasing. In turn, Milano's message supports the normalization of public BF. Milano's position as firmly entrenched in the male dominated world of television and film is key: it enables her to speak and promote change from within the system, for external oppositions often remain on the outside, as counterpoint. Using Instagram promotes this as well. Rather than dilute their power, intermingling BF images with those representing the dominant culture may prove more successful for its gradual progression to normalization. The end goal, of course, is to encourage not just acceptance but a sense of pleasure in seeing feminine representations of women, including those focused on aspects of motherhood, like BF.

title: 'If you look at me like at a piece of meat, then that's a problem' women in the center of the male gaze. Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis as a tool of critique
abstract: This article proposes a discursive approach to beauty, which it illustrates with a close data analysis of women's relationship with the 'male gaze' In gender and feminist studies, the male gaze is invoked with reference to the patriarchal surveillance of women's bodies. The article complements studies that approach the surveillance as a socio cultural phenomenon by investigating it as a discursive accomplishment of a social relation and identification. Taking a Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis approach to the matter (and combining it with a discursive psychological perspective) this article focuses on the complexities and ambiguities underwriting individuals' personalized ways of dealing with being looked at. Women's positioning to the male gaze by means of culturally available discourses is found to reveal ambiguous sites of agency and submission within its scope. Examining them, the article addresses the importance of combining a feminist poststructuralist perspective on the relations of gender with women's lived understandings of being implicated in them. (How) can lived and academic sensibilities be set side by side in gender research? Is there a methodology of discourse analysis that facilitates this?

title: 'I'm a Creep, I'm a Weirdo' Street Photography in the Service of the Male Gaze
abstract: This chapter considers two phenomena, both of which involve the digitally mediated collection and sharing of images of people without their knowledge or consent. In the first, "creepshots," individuals take surreptitious photographs and share them on online message boards. In the second, individuals scour virtual street maps (such as Google Street View) for "notable" images that are then placed elsewhere online for others to review. In both cases, there is a large and anonymous audience viewing the images. In both cases, women in public or quasi public spaces are the overwhelming targets of this digital gaze. In both cases, the online commentary quickly becomes sexual in nature, and is frequently overtly hostile. This chapter argues that these practices implicate different kinds of harms broader, more diffuse than conventional privacy invasions. As such, rather than being understood through the rubric of 'privacy' they are better understood as a new form of public surveillance. Consequently, legal mechanisms grounded in the typical (liberal) dichotomous understanding of what is public and what is private are unlikely to prove an adequate solution.

title: Explainer what does the male gaze mean and what about a female gaze

title: Muslim male segmentation: the male gaze and girl power in Malaysian vampire movies
abstract: The purpose of this paper is to propose and develop a distinct perspective from the consumer culture theory in the context of Muslim consumers, marketing and the feminist theory.  This paper is based on a critical review of the literature for insights into the consumer culture theory in the context of Muslim consumers, Islamic marketing paradigm and the feminist theory.  The study suggests that scholars in the area of marketing may consider drawing on the theory of Islamic consumer culture, film and feminist theory. This theory can be used as a platform to understand the Muslim mind and the related cultural traits to create greater engagement and interest in Malaysian horror genres among local and international audience. The Malaysian local horror genres currently have an interesting blend of Islam, local culture and gender biases addressing the universal concept of good against the evil forces, and this has the potential of offering new experiences to especially international audiences.  This study is purely theory based and is aimed at knowledge development in this field of Islamic consumer culture. It also invites academics to engage in scholarly activities toward theory building in this area.  The study provides directions for areas of possible future research in Islamic marketing, consumer culture and film studies.  This study intends to broaden the research efforts in Islamic consumer culture marketing in terms of innovative ways to serve this growing Muslim market.  This study contributes to the discipline by providing new perspectives in Islamic consumer culture inquiry in the context of film studies.

title: Resisting the Male Gaze: Feminist Responses to the "Normatization" of the Female Body in Western Culture
abstract: Power relations can materially penetrate the body in depth, without depending even on the mediation of the subject's own representation. Michel Foucault (3) The purpose of this study is to discuss some aspects of the representation of female corporeity in Western culture, a representation universally recognized as having been constructed and developed through a gender ideology at the service of the institutions of patriarchy, and covertly disseminated through the imposed and controlling definition of the "ideal" model of the female body. Secondly, the study intends to show how opposition in feminist thought to this patriarchally motivated representation has emerged through a specific discourse of resistance, a re representation of human corporeity, focusing on variations of the notion of hybridity, multiple mixed bodily forms. The first part of this article outlines what I have termed "normatized corporeity" i.e. the media induced promotion of a norm of bodily appearance along with the physical, psychological and social consequences provoked by that normative canon. The second part explores cultural and feminist theory in order to identify some of the avenues for resistance to the imposition of bodily normativity, resistance foregrounded by the awareness of the disciplinary function of the male gaze, the refusal of a univocal model for the female body and, above all, the commitment to the principle of difference. (4) Part I: Normatized Corporeity The Binarized Body Cultural representations of the body have been delineated according to a model for the human subject as male, white, heterosexual, middle class, leading to descriptions of corporeity rotating around a binary framework, an either/or condition, encoding distinctions of gender, race and class: male/female, white/black, heterosexual/homosexual, middle class/working class etc. Actually, given that the combination male+white+heterosexual+middle class seems to be the prototype for the human subject, the binary is more rightly defined as male/non male, white/nonwhite, heterosexual/ non heterosexual, middle class non middle class. In other words, there is one polarity of the binary that carries negative social value since it is presented as a "noncondition" as something "missing" or "unachieved" as a "deficit" condition, whereas the positive polarity is erected as norm. It could be added also that in our contemporary times, another descriptor has been added, weight, with the normative condition as thinness and the deficit condition as non thinness. One of the main victims of the strictures of this socially constructed binary is the female part of humanity, the "second sex" to cite the seminal attribute for women theorized by the icon of feminist thought, Simone De Beauvoir. Moreover, women are especially victimized when they possess one or more of these non conditions, i.e. non male, non heterosexual, non white, non middle class (and non thin) etc. The Female Body Feminist scholarship in the Western tradition has constantly denounced the historical invisibility and inaudibility of the female subject. Deprived of voice in culture, society and politics, women have been traditionally confined to the muted corners of domesticity, to the silenced margins of sociality, to the powerless outskirts of politicality. At the same time, female corporeity is intensely visible; exemplary of what Foucault (1980:186) considers a paradox in contemporary culture the simultaneous disappearance and over exposure of the body in culture, institutions, and in the persuasive discourse of social communication. However, this apparently paradoxical condition of the simultaneous presence of corporeal visibility and invisibility, in Foucauldian terms, carries a particularly salient political value when it touches the female subject. The invisibility of women has been accompanied in an extraordinarily inversely proportionate manner by the visual display of her physical appearance, of her body as material object, to be observed, judged, valued, appreciated, rejected, modified and essentially commodified, for socially constructed purposes.

title: The Male Gaze and Online Sports Punditry
abstract: On September 11, 2010, Ines Sainz, a sports reporter for Mexican television network TV Azteca, was allegedly harassed by members of the New York Jets football team. Controversy erupted around the role of women in sports broadcasting and the myriad attendant dimensions involved, including issues of credibility, dominant beauty ideals, and the male gaze, among others. This study assesses how sports blogs covered the controversy, using a combination of in depth interviewing and textual analysis of four popular sports blogs. The analysis revealed that the blogs constructed an atmosphere that exposed attitudes of objectification, Sainz's perceived lack of credibility, and the sexual economy of sports blogs.

title: An Experimental Analysis of Young Women's Attitude Toward the Male Gaze Following Exposure to Centerfold Images of Varying Explicitness
abstract: Centerfold images (i.e. still shot depictions of lone, provocatively posed, scantily clad women) are one of the most enduring, pervasive, and popular forms of sexual media. This study measured young women's attitude toward the male gaze following exposure to centerfolds of varying explicitness. Explicitness was operationalized as degree of undress. Women exposed to more explicit centerfolds expressed greater acceptance of the male gaze than women exposed to less explicit centerfolds immediately after exposure and at a 48 hour follow up. These results support the view that the more media depictions of women display women's bodies, the stronger the message they send that women are sights to be observed by others. They also suggest that even brief exposure to explicit centerfolds can have a nontransitory effect on women's sociosexual attitudes.

title: Gender responsivity and the male gaze