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This essay explores some aspects of the cultural construction of breasts in a male-dominated society, seeking a positive women’s voice for breasted experience. It begins with a discussion of the dominant culture’s objectification of breasts. Relying on Irigaray’s suggestive ideas about women’s sexuality and an alternative metaphysics not constructed around the concept of object, an experience of breast movement and sensitivity from the point of view of the female subject is presented. It asks how women’s breasts might be experienced in the absence of an objectifying male gaze, and discusses how breasts are a scandal for patriarchy because they disrupt the border between motherhood and sexuality. Finally, the question of objectification is revisited through reflections on a woman’s encounter with the surgeon’s knife at her breast.

Scepticism about the power of pictures to convey moral messages and to improve the quality of moral reflection is unfounded, as is scepticism about links between moral and aesthetic evaluation. Pictures can afford moral insights, especially as vehicles for seeing- in. However, this amplifies—it does not diminish—the force of critiques of some pictures, including the feminist critique of the male gaze.

This chapter examines sexual motifs in the mass culture of manga (comics) and anime (animation), looking at a form of male gazing targeted at children. The look is fashioned as coming from male watchers, and its objects are females who are either naked or eroticized at particular erotogenic zones (breasts, genitals, buttocks). Mothers spoken to find this form of presentation relatively harmless and view it as an acceptable forum for escapist leisure that takes children away from the hard work which otherwise consumes their lives. The chapter examines two aspects of this image: its location within a genre explicitly intended for children and its structure of a look at fetishized female bodies by male viewers whose gaze is illicit, coercive, and voyeuristic.

Insofar as erotic art and in particular the female nude makes male dominance and female subordination and objectification sexy, this chapter argues, it eroticizes the traditional gender hierarchy and in this way is a significant part of the complex mechanism that sustains sex inequality. To substantiate this claim, she offers a close analysis, supported by a long list of examples, of the different ways in which artworks belonging to the genre of the female nude can be sexually objectifying. She also lends some much-needed precision to the concept of the male gaze, and addresses two serious objections to her particular feminist approach. Firstly, if visual representations typically trade in tokens, not types, then the question arises how a picture can objectify women in general. Secondly, since many consider objectification to be a normal and even healthy part of human sexuality, one might wonder what is wrong with sexual objectification in the first place? This chapter concludes by underlining a significant difference between pornographic works and the traditional female nude: the latter not only eroticizes but also aestheticizes the sexual objectification of women, and does so ‘from on high’, art's venerated status investing the traditional nude's message of female inferiority with special authority, making it an especially effective way of promoting sexual inequality.

This chapter explores perceptions and representations of erôs in the pederastic epigrams of the Greek Anthology’s twelfth book, which is known as Strato’s Musa Puerilis. In these epigrams youthful male bodies and voluptuous gazes of older men construct an imagery that enables the articulation of various patterns of thought and action centered upon pederastic relations and the emotional load surrounding them. It is maintained that the male pederastic gaze of these poems functions as an emotional and intellectual lens associated with the identities of viewer and viewed, the social power relations between them, as well as the type and manifestations of their emotions. It is also shown that the same lens affects the ways in which these representations are related to the cultural context of the Musa Puerilis and are turned into poetry.

This chapter forms a hermeneutic of francophone films in which lesbian desire is a borderline case, situated on the edges of intelligibility. Before turning to Clare Whatling's ‘thrill of the forbidden’ (and questioning its political implications), it examines certain less exhilarating permutations on the liminally lesbian model. The chapter analyses these permutations in the following order: location of lesbian desire in an outsider figure; disavowal of lesbian identification despite obvious lesbian desire; the frequent influence of men or of the masculine, including the role of men when visibly present – typically, in triangular structures; women's defection from a lesbian relationship into the arms of a man through bad faith/internalised lesbophobia; machismo in butch lesbian characters; the lesbian figure and/or couple as eroticised object of the voyeuristic male gaze within the diegesis; and, finally, the role of men through their absence, giving rise to the possibility of an all-female space. In the case of triangulations, the liminality is merely a function of that set structure, and does not by any means always lend itself to particularly lesbo-appropriative readings.

This chapter discusses the three kinds of cinematic ‘look’ that Laura Mulvey associated with the ‘male gaze’. Mulvey's psychoanalytic examination of the pleasures generated by cinema included scopophilic, voyeuristic, and narcissistic pleasures. She argued that fetishistic scopophilia, unlike voyeurism, emphasises the physical beauty of the object. The object is transformed into something satisfying in itself, set apart from story and character involvement. This is illustrated with reference to Helen Faraday (Marlene Dietrich) in Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus (1932). Despite the story being about a woman and her predicament in patriarchal society, viewer identification is exclusively with male characters, and Helen is always an object for male spectators within the film and within the cinema. The chapter then contrasts von Sternberg with Mulvey's other key example, Alfred Hitchcock. Instead of merely presupposing male scopophilia/voyeurism, Hitchcock knowingly comments on these phenomena, making them the subject of his films. Though not mentioned by Mulvey, Psycho (1960) is offered as a case study in how the horror/slasher genre developed conventions that generated scopophilic and narcissistic pleasures for male viewers, perhaps catering to violent male fantasies.

This chapter examines how action heroines reconfigure the logic of power, privilege, and narrative authority associated with looking in media theory. It shows how most action heroines have assumed an active gaze of their own, rather than simply being the subject of a male gaze, and the ability to control whatever they may discover. It traces the development of the active female gaze as represented by detective heroines in key texts ranging from Cagney & Lacey and The Silence of the Lambs to Twisted and Taking Lives. Despite gradually becoming stronger and more independent agents, the chapter argues that these detective heroines’ mastery of vision is still presented as a weak spot that keeps female characters tethered to a narrative position as potential victims and as sexualized objects of a threatening male gaze. Finally, it considers how action heroines in general rework the gaze as a glare.

In this chapter, Yamamoto-Wilson examines the role of the Other’s gaze in early modern masochistic fantasy, starting with reader responses to martyrologies (particularly Foxe), hagiography and bloody histories, and moving on to erotic and proto-pornographic narratives (among which Nicholas Chorier’s Satyra Sotadica is preeminent) and narratives of sexual insecurity. Georges Duby, Lisa Silverman and others have argued that, in the late Middle Ages, dolor was the property of women, and Melissa Sanchez demonstrates how, in the early modern period, the political subject was discursively feminized through injunctions to suffer. The gaze of the Other both emasculates and humiliates, but perseverance in suffering (whether in the martyr’s sacrifice or the masochist’s fantasy) leads, paradoxically, to triumph. While the Other is sometimes depicted as male, there is an emergent sense of a transgressive female gaze, reflected in the writings of Thomas Nashe, Samuel Butler, Mary Wroth and others. This chapter focuses on the male anxiety generated by the gaze of a female Other in the literary discourse of early modern England.

This chapter addresses the question of the woman's perspective by examining the ways in which the male gaze affects Genji's beloved wife, Murasaki. No woman depicted in the Genji epitomizes the stages of a female character's evolving attitude toward the predominantly male practice of kaimami better than the character after whom Murasaki Shikibu was nicknamed: Murasaki. It is in the Kitayama mountains where the cherry blossoms have just peaked that Genji first espies her as a child, in Chapter 5 (“Wakamurasaki”). In Chapter 28 (“Nowaki”), she is a grown woman, married to Genji, when a typhoon sweeps aside the protective curtains to allow Genji's son Yūgiri a forbidden glimpse of his stepmother. Fifteen years later, Murasaki is dead at age forty-four, and Yūgiri catches another glimpse, but this anomalous kaimami of her dead body is almost totally emptied of nature's colorful intervention.

Joan Ormrod begins the section with “Body Issues in Wonder Woman 90-100 (1994-1995): Good Girls, Bad Girls, Macho Men.” In an era that saw the emergence of violent, silicone-breasted, wasp-waisted bad girls, D.C.’s Wonder Woman’s sales dropped. In response, Diana/Wonder Woman was reconceptualized to fit the new mold. Study of this shift to elongated, muscular bodies in fetishized clothing and soft-core porn poses, argues Ormrod, is productively achieved through application and critique of Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze. Then, positing an alternative model based on Turner’s notion of the “somatic society,” Ormrod reads the superhuman body as a metaphor for the body within wider culture, offering a historically contextualized commentary on women’s changing place in society in the 1990s.

This chapter argues that the interpretation of games like Bayonetta, Portal, and Tomb Raider rests on an implementation of the theory of the male gaze that isolates visuality from a greater context of computation, procedure, race, and history. It challenges the prevailing interpretations of Chell as “good” and Bayonetta as “bad” representations of women in video games. First, it situates the struggle between Chell and GLaDOS as an antifeminist one in which the player uses the power of the gaze, located in Chell’s voiceless brown body, to subdue the powerful bodiless voice of GLaDOS. This reduces Chell, a brown woman who is the test subject of a scientific experiment, to an instrument of patriarchy. On the other hand, Bayonetta, who is widely criticized as a hypersexual fantasy figure, performs what micha cárdenas calls queer femme disturbance, an excessive performance of femininity that disrupts heteronormative and patriarchal power. These two women offer more context to the case of Lara Croft, who has become more violent and less sexy over the years, and who has ascended to the position of brutal white colonizer while courting a feminist audience.

This chapter examines striptease as a symbolic act of gender, revenge, and power negotiation by focusing on such traditionally derided film genres as erotic thrillers, straight-to-video action, and pornography in which strippers are presented as defiant and self-rescuing heroines. It argues that in such films, the power of the male gaze is destabilized or, at least, that the privilege associated with the assumed right to look at exposed female bodies is destabilized. It shows that even women who are fully open for male inspection actually wield more concrete power than the men looking at them. Yet it also suggests that female strippers have very little control. Finally, it demonstrates how their attractiveness and sexual objectification allow women and their sexuality to be consumed by men in the most conventional gendered form in a relatively guilt-free manner.

This chapter draws upon the personal narratives of noncommissioned rankers serving with the British Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I to explore how these men responded to encounters with bodily strength and weakness in their roles as male caregivers. In particular, it examines how they constructed the disablement of combatant troops by warfare in light of their own role as noncombatant service men. It locates this analysis in the context of a cultural historiography that has examined the gendering of the disabled male body in war primarily in relation to female caregivers. By examining the impact of disability on relationships between men in wartime, this chapter explores the role of the male gaze in constructing war disability and the gendering of caregiving.

This part draws upon Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” with regard to the patriarchal bias of mainstream film. The visual emphases of Mulvey’s work are redirected towards film sound tracks, opening up new possibilities for considering how gender politics are aurally communicated. This part provides a close analysis of the sound track of To Have and Have Not (1944), which is followed by an analysis of the internationally celebrated sound track for The Piano (1993). With particular attention to Lauren Bacall’s performances of songs in To Have and Have Not, and Holly Hunter’s piano playing in The Piano, this part considers the mixed messages of the films with regard to female empowerment. Particular attention is given to the controversial automutism of Ada McGrath (the character played by Hunter) and the diegetic sound effects of The Piano that establish a specific colonial context for understanding her aural subversiveness.

Chapter three identifies a key ideological ramification of polarized binaries, suggesting that a widened divide between concepts of male and female consistently shifts depictions of female characters to position them as the emotional and spiritual saviors of their male counterparts. The chapter draws on Mike Cadden’s analysis of single and double-voiced discourse and Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze to explore Warm Bodies, The 5th Wave, The Hunger Games, Paper Towns, and The Spectacular Now and explains how a greater emphasis on romantic elements in the film leads to constructions of male and female defined as more starkly different. The chapter posits three reasons that polarization of binaries leads to ideologies surrounding the female savior, concluding that shifts in point of view, attempts at female empowerment, and traps of the male gaze and Manic Pixie Dream Girl produce a film that is far more single-voiced than its textual predecessor.

This chapter provides an overview of River of Grass, Riechardt’s first feature film, production details via interviews, a close reading of the film with applications of Marxist-Feminist film theory, and an exploration of issues ranging from environmental concerns to the negation of heterosexual romance in a road movie genre. In contrast with her other features, River of Grass’s more overt feminist and experimental themes and gender role reversals align the film within an older feminist counter-cinematic tradition. Reichardt addresses theoretical film concepts such as the “male gaze” by emphasizing the female look and employs Godardian techniques to remind viewers they are watching a construction of reality.

In 1919, Edith Lewis began her long career as an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. This chapter considers the advertising campaigns for Woodbury’s Facial Soap and Jergens Lotion, for which Lewis was the sole copywriter in the 1920s, in relation to Willa Cather’s fiction and aesthetic theories. Lewis’s embrace of advertising as a career and Cather’s rejection of modern consumerism seem to register a conflict within their relationship. However, it could also be productive, even playful, as the two women engaged in an implicit dialogue about the pleasures and perils of modern materialism and the desires it could engender. The chapter also considers how Lewis shaped Cather’s approach to celebrity, focusing on Edward Steichen’s Vanity Fair portrait of Cather in 1927 and contrasting Cather’s approach to celebrity and advertising with that of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In nineteenth-century urban America, visual culture intertwined with and amplified a thriving sex industry. Long before the escapades of Civil War soldiers, the “wide-open” climate of gold rush California was prompting lawmakers to debate the merits of measures to suppress obscene pictures and texts. Forty years before the widespread application of the passport system, the first photographic archive of prospective immigrants was composed of Chinese women in the West. Before Anthony Comstock became a household name, San Francisco’s Custom House, police, and courts were struggling to suppress and prosecute a flood of “indecent materials” pouring through the port town from far-flung points like China, Japan, and France. Although San Francisco’s female population steadily increased from the late 1850s onward, commodified images and spectacles catering to male consumers’ lust—and female consumers’ curiosity, if not also lust—only became more popular and numerous in its urban culture.