Theorizing the male gaze free essay sample

Feminist analysis has revealed that when feminism characterizes â€Å"The male Gaze† certain motifs are almost sure to appear; voyeurism, objectification, fetishism, scopophilia, woman as the object of male gaze and the bearer of the male lack. Masculine vision is almost characterized as patriarchal, ideological and phallocentric. Gaulyn Studlar has observed that, the female can function for the male only as an object of sadistic spectatorial possession. Nothing could better serve the paternal supergo than to reduce masculine vision completely to the terms of power, violence, and control to make disappear whatever in the male gaze remains outside the patriarchal and pronounce outlawed, guilty, damaging and illicit possessive every male view of woman. The paradox can become stark when male critics take up the feminist critique, with vengeance. Theory seems always to choose its paradigms as instances of what it already knows. Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus was used to try out this theory as is one of the most complex ‘exceptions’ in all Renaissance. We will write a custom essay sample on Theorizing the male gaze or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The painting makes us to reconsider everything we think we know about â€Å"the gaze† and its positioning in desire. As compared to Carracci’s work Venus at her Toilet, the Velazquez may seem different as to be almost â€Å"about† different things not adornment but disencuberment not self-centeredness but solitude; the body not as object but span. Another painting â€Å" Venus at her mirror† by Ruben which is crowded, obsessive foregrounding, its fixated authorial/spectatorial involvement of the image to that â€Å"male† place-all was compared with Velazquez’s work Contrasting the Rokeby Venus was Manet’s Olympia which is more radical than Velazquez’s work. Manet reverses the power relation and turns the visual dynamics back on male viewer. Velazquez on the other hand, with inner calibrations may open things radically- the place of viewing as well as the scene depicted. The Rokeby Venus sometimes compared unfavourably to the other great Velazquez’s work on the basis of what is seen to be its dull, uninspired rendering to convey. The body needs to catch our eyes not as surfaces but as locus and horizon, a kind of figural gestalt. Mirror, can question gender and selfhood simultaneously; As a counterpart desire the mirror’s image has a tendency to detach herself from the woman from whom she apparently derives an, assuming a priority in desire, to gaze her intently, pleasurably, bemusedly much as we do. The image, in fact, seems to draw near the woman, while she in turn seems to recline away from it, her discarded garments interposed as if in modesty. It is almost as if the woman herself in all her precisely delineated reality exists only to mediate between us and that vague evocation in the mirror. The mirror image can be read as an exterior representation of an interior gaze- not a direct representation. A complex of sameness and otherness that both sexes fill out in different ways is what constitutes our own pleasure in the image. The Rokeby Venus encourages us to regard the whole doctrine about the so-called maleness of the gaze with suspicion.