Laura Mulvey's The Male Gaze Essay

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The Male Gaze The concept of the gaze refers to the analysis of visual culture that deals with the ways in which an audience view something. It is a lens to which one views pop culture. John Berger (1972) conducted work regarding the unconscious gaze, however, the theory of ‘the male gaze’ was coined by Laura Mulvey in her essay published in 1975 on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. This theory was created as a way of interpreting how audiences view women through the eyes of a heterosexual man. Within the theory three gazes consist. “There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records, the pro-filmic events, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other …show more content…

Simultaneously, the look of the audience is denied an intrinsic force: as soon as fethistic representation of the female image threatens to break the spell of illusion, and the erotic image in the screen appears directly (without mediation) to the spectator, the fact of fetishization, concealing as it does castration feat, freezes the look, fixates the spectator and prevents him from achieving any distance from the image in front of him” (Mulvey: 68). The theory of ‘the male gaze’ was initially introduced as film theory, however it has crossed boundaries and been applied to many other forms of media. It is appropriate to delve into the world of sport and show how the male gaze is used in sport. A whole new challenge is presented to female athletes to be accepted in a male dominated society. In regards to sport and how female athletes are represented by the media, there is often a lack of diversity to the way in which women are screened. Visually, the structure and implication of females on the front of magazine covers and in print advertisements, differs greatly from that of their male

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