Male Gaze
The male gaze is a feminist theory that explores how visual arts and media often depict the world from a masculine perspective, primarily affecting the portrayal of women. Coined by film critic Laura Mulvey in 1975, the concept examines the tendency of visual creators to objectify women, reducing them to mere spectacles for male enjoyment. Mulvey's framework divides the male gaze into three components: the perspective of the creator of the image, the gaze of characters within the artwork, and the viewpoint of the spectator, who typically identifies with the male perspective.
Rooted in psychoanalytic theory, the male gaze reflects broader societal dynamics where women are often seen as objects rather than subjects. The implications of this concept extend beyond film and have been applied to various forms of visual art. Through this lens, the male gaze is recognized for its hypermasculine portrayal of women, highlighting how women are frequently positioned to be looked at, rather than to be active participants in visual narratives. Understanding the male gaze invites a critical examination of how gendered perspectives influence representation in media and art.
On this Page
Male Gaze
The male gaze is a feminist concept referring to the way visual arts view the world from a masculine perspective. Coined by film critic Laura Mulvey in 1975, the concept is described as the tendency of visual artists to portray society from a primarily male point of view. According to many feminist theorists, the male gaze commonly comes into play when depicting women. The male gaze is made up of three specific gazes, each of which perpetuates a distorted, male-centric view of reality.
Origins
Mulvey's idea of the male gaze originated with the theories of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Psychoanalysis is a psychological therapy that examines how external factors have powerful effects on a person's mental health. Jacques Lacan described the concept of a gaze as the objectification of the person being viewed and the subject's desire to be seen. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was also affected by what he called the look of the Other, which dominates and possesses the individual being looked at.
The notion of the specifically male gaze first entered the mainstream consciousness with the publication of Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." The essay used feminist, psychoanalytic, and film theory to examine the male-dominated view of women in cinema. Mulvey referred to the habit filmmakers have of depicting women as a spectacle to be viewed for a man's pleasure. The camera turns a woman into an object to be looked at and fixated on in a sexual way. Though the term was originally used in reference to film, the male gaze has since been applied to other types of visual art.
The Three Gazes
Mulvey's male gaze is divided into three separate gazes. The first gaze is that of the person who creates the image. In terms of filmmaking, this can be any number of people ranging from the camera operator, editor, screenwriter, or director. The second gaze is that of the characters within the work of visual art. The characters can be male or female; what designates the gaze as male is the masculine features the viewpoint adopts. The third gaze is that of the spectator, which tends to identify with the male gaze of the creator.
The male gaze is identifiable by its hypermasculine perspective of females as sexual objects. An example of a scene illustrating the male gaze would be a camera focusing special attention on the curves of a woman's figure. Mulvey emphasizes that the act of looking is an important factor of the male gaze, stressing that the scenario most often involves the man looking and the female being looked at.
Bibliography
Brand, Peggy Zeglin, and Carolyn Korsmeyer, ed. Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics. Penn State UP, 1995, pp. 126-139.
"Feminist Aesthetics." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 12 Mar. 2021, plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-aesthetics/. Accessed 25 Oct. 2025.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze. Routledge, 2012, pp. 56-72.
Walters, Suzanna Danuta. Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory. University of California Press, 1995, pp. 57-61.