The Male Gaze Analysis

The ‘Male Gaze’: A Gendered Way of Looking
The feminist art movement began in the 1960s and was truly kick started in 1971, when the art historian Linda Nochlin published a groundbreaking essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? In which she investigated the social and economic factors that had prevented talented women from achieving the same status as their male counterparts. This brought more visibility to female artists, who were now releasing more political statements in their artwork; among these artists are Ghada Amer and Barbara Kruger. The primary issue they dealt with was equality between males and females, through examining the issue of the ‘predominant male gaze’: this is a theory by Laura Mulvey which, in loose cinematic

In the vast majority of hierarchies, men are at the top – but why? This question has faced women, unanswered, since we first walked the earth and quickly realised we answered to men. The first acknowledged female group to fight this established idea are the Suffragettes (National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society), who mobilised the use of political posters to spread their messages. This can be seen as one of the first forms of feminist artwork, because much like the works of Amer and Kruger decades later, they addressed the ‘gendering way of looking’. This suffragette poster addresses how ridiculous the hierarchy would be if the roles were reversed, putting a man in the place of a housewife. By inviting the viewer to challenge their normal perception of a female in the same position, they undercut and distort the idea of the male gaze, suggesting how ludicrous it was that women couldn’t vote simply because those in charge viewed them through the eyes of a heterosexual man, and decided they were incapable, removing their intelligence and

In Ghada Amer’s work, La Jaune, 1999, she invites us to rethink the way in which women are depicted: sexually. Amer asks us to consider female sexuality in the media by focusing on a social problem regarding female representation, especially in the modern world: pornography. By exhibiting pornographic imagery from sex industry magazines and representing them in copied and outlined images, she addresses the idea of the 'male gaze' through presenting women as sexual entities, upon whom which man has greater power to look on. Along with addressing the degradation of women and their presentation as objects, Amer was challenging a key issue that has faced women throughout history: female pleasure. She battles the stigma surrounding female physical pleasure, an afterthought which sits below the priority of male pleasure. Female pleasure serves to appeal to the 'male gaze’, exposed through the images of female erotica, yet on another level, pleasure is explored through the ‘typically female’ preference of sewing, through the embroidery also incorporated in the