Female gaze

The female gaze is a feminist theory term representing the gaze of the female spectator, character or director of an artistic work, but more than the gender it is an issue of representing women as subjects having agency. As such both genders can create films with a female gaze. It is a response to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey's term "the male gaze", which represents not only the gaze of a heterosexual male viewer but also the gaze of the male character and the male creator of the film. In contemporary usage, the female gaze has been used to refer to the perspective a female filmmaker (screenwriter/director/producer) brings to a film that would be different from a male view of the subject. The female gaze is not about banning sex, desire and fantasies, but about showing that these can exist without objectification. It puts men, women and everybody on equal footing.

History[]

Mulvey discusses aspects of voyeurism and fetishism in the male gaze in her article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". She draws from Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film, Rear Window, applying terms from Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis to discuss camera angle, narrative choice, and props in the movie while focusing on the concept of the male gaze. From what Jeffries, the protagonist in Rear Window, looks at through his camera to the camera angles in his discussion with his girlfriend, the male gaze is accentuated by each move in Mulvey's article. Mulvey's article focused on the concept of "scopophilia", or a pleasure in gazing and placed women as spectacles to be objectified and viewed, unable to return a gaze and dismissing women in film as adequate representations of human beings.^[1]

Theoretical implementation[]

The female gaze looks at three viewpoints.

1. The individual filming
2. The characters within the film
3. The spectator

These three viewpoints also concern Mulvey's male gaze but focuses, instead, on women. Viewpoints expanded alongside diversity in film genres. Woman's films were a genre that focused on female leads, showing the female as a diegetic story-teller rather than that of a spectacle. Movies such as Rebecca and Stella Dallas are examples of such films in which the traditional narrative is told through the female protagonist. This genre of film has evolved into modern day "chick flicks" such as 27 Dresses and The Devil Wears Prada. The films are meant to represent the desires of female protagonists and, therefore, are to represent the desires of the female movie-viewer.^[1]

Zoe Dirse looks at the female gaze through the documentary film genre, analyzing aspects of pleasure and viewer identification. She analyzes the gaze at the points of production and reception. She notes that if the cinematographer is female and the subject is also female, the object of the film takes on a different role. Dirse argues that having a female cinematographer allows women to be viewed as they really are and not the voyeuristic spectacle that the male gaze makes them out to be. While filming in Cairo, Dirse was in a crowd and observed being noticed by the men around her. At first they seemed curious, and Dirse wondered if it was because of her gender or the fact that she had a camera. It was not long before they began to push past her, and she felt a sense of danger that she felt other women in Cairo shared. This is depicted in her film, Shadow Maker. She said that her gender allowed her to be an unobtrusive observer – unlike a man – when filming gypsies singing.^[2]

Paula Marantz Cohen discusses the female gaze in the chick flick genre, with specific attention to the attire women wear. Spectacle overrules plot in films such as The Awful Truth. Irene Dunne's wardrobe is regarded as a central aspect of the film. The different dresses that Dunn wears are extravagant but not sexualized. While the clothing may be regarded as comical, they are also supportive to Dunn's independence and femininity. Cohen notes that in the film The Wedding Planner, Jennifer Lopez is fully clothed throughout the entire film. The clothes, as in The Awful Truth, are regarded as comical yet they catch the viewer's eye without sexualizing her. Cohen also analyzes the relationship between the female lead stars of these films and their male co-stars. She states that these films truly depict what women want, that they are accentualized in a positive manner and have a partner who amplifies this accentuation.^[3]

Contemporary usage[]

Critics have focused attention on the presence of the female gaze in cinema and television, in works such as The Handmaid's Tale, I Love Dick, Fleabag, and The Love Witch.^[4][5]

The controversial lesbian drama film Blue Is the Warmest Colour received considerable critical comment for the dominance of the male gaze and lack of female gaze, with some reviewers calling it a "patriarchal gaze".^[6][7][8][9] The author of the book upon which the film was based was among the harshest critics, saying, "It appears to me this was what was missing on the set: lesbians."^[10]

Filmmaker April Mullen has said, "Women have this vulnerability and connection to a depth of emotions that I can see and feel in certain moments of truth in the films we create. To me, the female gaze is transparency – the veil between audience and filmmaker is thin, and that allows people in more."^[11][12][13]

At the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, Joey Soloway, in their keynote address, explored the definition of the female gaze in film-making.^[14] Specifically, Soloway outlined three concepts, mimicking Laura Mulvey's original triangulation of the male gaze (the spectator, the filmmaker, and the actors). Soloway's conception of the female gaze goes beyond a mere inversion of Mulvey's male gaze, however, and instead imagines the ways in which the female gaze in filmmaking can provide insight into the lived female experience.^[14] Their concept includes "the feeling camera" (or "bodies over equipment" wherein emotions are prioritized over action); "the gazed gaze," which shows viewers how it feels to be the object of the gaze; and "returning the gaze" (or "I see you seeing me" and "how it feels to stand here in this world having been seen our entire lives").^[14]

Criticisms[]

In “No Such Thing Not Yet: Questioning Television Female Gaze“, Caetlin Benson-Allot discusses the lack of representation of minorities in the female gaze.^[15] She argues that although the female gaze presumes a universal experience based on shared gender, it tends to ignore minorities, choosing instead to focus on the lives of white middle class women. In the article she specifically focuses on the small screen which has been getting a lot of attention for enacting the female gaze. In it she uses examples from the TV shows I Love Dick, GLOW^[16] and Insecure. She argues that although I Love Dick and GLOW introduce characters of color, they do so by casting them in supporting roles which never destabilize the white protagonist. Insecure on the other hand she argues, provides a model for future feminist television. The show follows Issa and her friend Molly and focuses on the self-defeating impulses in their personal and professional relationships. The story line also focuses on Issa’s job working with at-risk youth, which helps in exploring the racial dynamics of Los Angeles.  Using anti-racist comedy, Insecure challenges the focus on white feminism and neglect of black women.^[15]

Canadian cinematographer Zoe Dirse also criticizes the reproduction of the female gaze and the under-representation of women in technical areas of film making.^[2] Using her experience in the documentary genre, she focuses on the female gaze at the point of production. Dirse focuses on the dominance of the white middle class male in the film industry. Women are often shut out of the film industry due to its profitable nature. This created a lack of women producing for the female viewer or reproducing the female gaze. She uses examples of excerpts from films to explore the need for female directors and technical crew in properly reproducing the female gaze. One example she gives is that of the 1992 documentary film Forbidden Love, which focuses on the stories of lesbians coming out in the 1950s. In it, the feminist, lesbian directors manage to subvert the male gaze in favor of the female one. Creating a view in which the actors are not objects of male desire, but of female desire. She argues that when there are feminist filmmakers, the film creates feminist elements. She argues that it is crucial for women to take control of their art in order to accurately reproduce the female gaze.^[2]

In Chick Flicks and the straight female gaze, Natalie Perfetti-Oates explains how the heterosexual female gaze can become problematic with the rise of male sexual objectification.^[17] This is due to the use of sex negativity when enacting this gaze. Sex negativity occurs when men are trapped as solely sex objects. Chick flicks that cast their male leads solely as sex objects for the female viewers, serve to reverse gender discrimination rather than creating gender equality. Oates explains how more and more action movies and Chick flick films create the heterosexual female gaze through showcasing male's bodies. In her article, Oates uses examples from films such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall, New Moon, and Magic Mike. In Magic Mike, for example, Mike only becomes a love interest after he quits his job as a stripper. Thus illustrating Mike as a sex object or love interest, but not both creating sex negativity. She argues that progress towards equality will be made when both men and women can move freely between the position of subject and object; not when men are objectified just as women have been.^[17]

In Jessica Taylor's Romance and the female gaze obscuring gendered violence in the Twilight Saga, Taylor criticizes the emerging female gaze and how it interacts with romance to portray violent male bodies as desirable. She focuses on the very popular Twilight Saga, which she describes as seemingly retrograde and naïve in its use of romance conventions. To explain how the female gaze works to create violent male bodies as desirable, she looks back on the work of Mulvey and her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Specifically, she focuses on the notion of “fetishistic scopophilia” that was previously used by Mulvey to explain how the anxiety-inducing female body becomes fetishized and a source of pleasure for the male viewer, leading female viewers towards hyper-desirability gaze of the bodies of the male characters, and pushing the female audience to desire the powerful, violent male body rather than fear it. Examples that she gives are the way in which the body of both Jacob and Edward are manipulated by categorizing them as visually desirable “boys”. It reduces the threat of violence and neutralizes the potential threats to the female viewers. Taylor argues that the use of a limited and specific female gaze can re-code incidents of gendered violence and violent male body as both reassuring and desirable.^[18]

See also[]

• List of LGBT films directed by women
• List of lesbian filmmakers
• Otome game

External links[]

• Female Gaze: Women Directors + Women Cinematographers - The Criterion Channel
• Female Gaze Teaser on Criterion's YouTube channel

References[]