The male gaze

By Kamal Raj Sigdel 
(This is an excerpt from a research on male gaze and Nepali television commercials.)

[Download a Nepali version of this journal Article published in Media Studies, Martin Chautari, Vol 1: 

https://martinchautari.org.np/storage/files/media-adhyayan-1-article-kamalraj-sigdel.pdf 

https://martinchautari.org.np/mc-publications/media-adhyayan-1

 

Summary

This research explores into the semiotics of Nepalese mass media, especially the television commercials which display a sort of obsession with portraying men-women relation in a manner that caters to male voyeuristic gaze. The structuration of the Nepalese television advertisements shows how an all-pervasive psychological force, gears to monopolize the audience of the television commercials as only males by positioning the women characters therein as passive sexual objects who can only exhibit to-be-looked-at-ness and the male characters as the principal viewer. This paper examines the Nepalese television commercials with the theoretical possibilities provided by the psychoanalysis, where the idea of voyeurism and fetishism are central and the Focauldian concept of gaze, where the activity of looking images under certain spectacles provide privileged power for dominion over what is being looked at. The research thus takes on to explicate how the combination of these two effects in Nepalese television commercials lead to ideological formations.

The Male Gaze

There is a basic difference between look and gaze. To look normally means to have a normal sight of something that our eyes can catch. But gaze is different form look; it is more associated with power. Gaze normally refers to a stare, which means to look at something continuously without winking our eyes so as to carefully observe or dominate what is being looked at. It is natural that none objects or cares when we look people but everyone feels uncomfortable or even gets angry when we gaze them curiously. When a male looks at objects through this particular kind of gaze, it is normally called male gaze and when a female does so, it is called female gaze. 

This normal meaning could help us understand how look and gaze are operational in commercials, the subject of study of this research. 

When we look at an object, we see more than just the thing itself: we see the relation between the thing and ourselves. Some objects are intentionally made to be looked upon. While constructing the objects that are to be looked upon, a viewer is always presupposed. For example, if we take the trend of Nepalese television and print advertisements, in most of them a male is often, if not always, the presupposed viewer and the female are the viewed. The image of woman in those advertisements are portrayed usually as inactive, submissive and passive, or sometimes even shown admiring her own image in a mirror. All this is done to nurture the presupposed viewer's sense of possession and control. 

The "portrayal of woman and her beauty in such a position offers up the pleasure for the male spectator" (Mulvey 5). So the male gaze here is the powerful look which can control and possess the images that are fearlessly looked at for his pleasure. But the spectator's gaze sees not merely the object of the gaze, but sees the relationship between the object and the self. He sees her as a creature of his domain, under his gaze of possession. So, male gaze refers to a powerful and purposive stare at the women’s images to take pleasure of looking at women’s body parts through a secure vantage point. 

In the case of recorded texts such as photographs, advertisements and films, a key feature of the gaze is that the object of the gaze is not aware of the current viewer (though they may originally have been aware of being filmed, photographed, painted etc.). 

Viewing such recorded images gives the viewer's gaze a voyeuristic dimension. This applies to cinema and advertisements where the situation is such that the viewer is privileged to be in a position where the images that walk and talk in the screen cannot look back at the viewer. This privileged position gives the viewer a chance to fearlessly identify his “self” to the acting protagonist’s self in the screen. 

The male gaze is seen operating in viewing produced cinema or commercials through a voyeuristic fantasy, but it also operates through fetishism. This occurs especially when a male confronts a female body in such a situation where the male viewer is visible to the female also. 

The male gaze is said to be the outcome of the fear that all man harbour throughout their life. This fear, according to Laura Mulvey, emerges whenever male sees female body parts, which reminds them of “castration anxiety”. And the male gaze is the way out to overcome the “castration anxiety” (Mulvey 5). So depending on the situation, the male gaze leads either to fetishization of women’s body parts or to voyeuristic victimization of the fetish.

Read the full text of the research here.

Follow Kamal on Twitter: @Kamalraj99