The male gaze

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Etymology

Coined by British film theorist Laura Mulvey in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), drawing on psychoanalytic theory. "Gaze" comes from a Scandinavian-rooted Middle English word for staring. Flagged as a coinage.

  1. noun phrase · /thuh MAYL GAYZ/

    A way of depicting the world, especially women, from an assumed heterosexual male viewpoint that treats them as objects to be looked at.

    What it names

    A tool for noticing whose pleasure a film, ad, or image is built around — and how a camera can turn a person into a spectacle.

    Example

    The action movie framed its heroine entirely through the male gaze, lingering on her body between every fight.

    Related idea

    Compare the Spectacle, a society organized around images; the male gaze is a narrower rule about who those images are made to please.

See also

OrientalismPatriarchyThe Spectacle