The Male Gaze: "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance"

The paintings on this page are all connected in a lineage which relates to the viewer's gaze. This gaze is the act of looking, and it's a powerful tool that is activated by both the artist as the creator and the audience as the viewer.

The idea and function of the gaze have existed forever, but it entered academic discourse most noticeably when it was posited and examined in Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness where he claimed that the act of looking and the act of being looked at is the act of turning into and being turned into an object.

The idea of the gaze was used in Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" where she described the function of the male gaze in the world of film, but her ideas apply to many forms. In the essay, she writes "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy the female figure which is styled accordingly." 

This idea is a valuable tool for the analysis of art history. It helps guide our way of looking at the paintings above. But is there a way to combat the gaze from within the painting?

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Arizona State University , www.asu.edu/courses/fms504/total-readings/mulvey-visualpleasure.pdf.