Rethinking the Gaze: Problems of apparatus, class, gender, sexuality and race By:Jason Grant McKahan...
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Transcript of Rethinking the Gaze: Problems of apparatus, class, gender, sexuality and race By:Jason Grant McKahan...
Rethinking the Gaze: Problems of apparatus, class, gender,
sexuality and race
By:Jason Grant McKahan
Presentation by:Brian Ambrose
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
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)
Laura Mulvey and the Gaze Theory
• “Normal” subject formation
• Interpellates subjects as “masculine” subjects
Gaze Theory
• Notion of a single, unitary, masculine spectator
• Humanistic, masculine, heterosexual, middle-class, white male
Apparatus
• Mulvey’s arguments have become accepted practice for feminist and ideological groups
• Spectators as subjects and cinema as apparatus
• “Phallocentricism”
Rethinking the Apparatus
• Neutral access to objective truth of the world
• “Vision can be seen as a subjective and complex phenomenon vulnerable to misperception”
Rethinking the Apparatus (con’t)
• Muybridge’s zooproxiscopic films of the 1870’s
• Animal locomotion
• “Human bodies” in motion!
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”
The “Class” Conflict (con’t)
• Capitalist Hollywood
• Vision, desire, and subjectivity are constructed within a sex/gender class system
Rethinking Gender
• Can psychoanalysis provide any useful examination of women?
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”
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
Relevant Films
Sexuality at a “Gaze”
• Gender and sexuality need to be seen as separate categories
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
A closer look at race
• Racial formation not taken into account
• The gaze of non-whites has always been explicitly political
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
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!
Guided Questions
The notion of a single, unitary, masculine, spectator is often called _____ _______.
Human body, gaze theory,Freudian fetishism
Guided Questions
According to Mulvey, women were seen as passive and fetishized objects for an active male
subject’s gaze? T/F
Discussion/Review Question
Which problem discussed (apparatus, class, gender, sexuality, or race) do you find most significant in the clarification of the gaze theory?
Questions