Modern day examples of “the gaze”

A response focusing on Chapter 3 from Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright’s, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture

In Chapter 3 of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Communication, Sturken and Cartwright focus intently on the idea of “the gaze,” a term that “sometimes carries connotations of looking long and intently with affection, awe, wonder, or fascination” (94). The term has journeyed across multiple disciplines and has also received great attention in the feminist culture. As a result of these travels, its definition has various interpretations. The authors mention that although the concept of “the gaze” originated in classical Hollywood filmmaking, it was French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who brought the term into popular usage.  

This concept of “the gaze” is prevalent across the children’s literature and film genre. Take for example, Ken Mochizuki’s Baseball Saved Us. The story follows a young boy, Shorty, and his Japanese American family during their time at an internment camp immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The family finds relieve through baseball and it is through this sport that deep, conceptual themes for the book surface. In one particular image, Shorty is pictured at home plate, up to bat for his team. Viewers of the image (“spectators” as Sturken and Cartwright would say) see Shorty from the viewpoint of the stands/bleachers at the baseball park; spectators see the cage that surrounds home plate, (seen in the book cover pictured here) and Shorty’s back caged is within it. 

 This image in turn symbolizes the confinement Shorty and his family feels by living at the camp. Also in the upper left third of the image, a rough-sketched guard sits in a tower, observing the game that takes place below. The guard wears sunglasses and a shadow casts over his face. In this example, “the gaze… thus helps to establish relationships of power” (111). This illustration establishes a difference that Sturken and Cartwright discuss. The authors write: “In systems of representation, meaning is established through difference. Hence, throughout the history of representation and language, binary oppositions, such as… culture/nature or white/black, have been used to organize meaning” (111). In Dom Lee’s illustration, the guard is given the power as he looks down upon Shorty and the Japanese Americans with an all-powerful stare.

We may look to Hans Christian Andersen’s classic children’s tale, The Steadfast Tin Soldier for another example. In this story, a tin soldier falls in love with a paper ballerina and gazes at her intently. Although the descriptions provided in the text are more profound than those in the animated version, the following clip features an adaptation of Andersen’s story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGwk0bb3qC8&feature=related.

In this example “the gaze” suggests that females are submissive recipients of the “male” gaze. Sturken and Cartwright write that “women are posted as objects of an active or ‘male’ gaze, and their returning looks are most often downcast, indirect, or otherwise coded as passive” (124). This is the case for the soldier and the ballerina. This gaze makes reference to a power ratio between males and females; the power rests with the male gazer leaving the female helpless under the watch of this powerful gaze. In this state, the female is objectified and at times viewed as “the other” (see here--http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/other.html-- for more information on “the other”). This example confirms what Sturken and Cartwright write: “The concept of the gaze is fundamentally about the relationship of pleasure and looking” (124).

This idea of the gaze can even be seen in television today. For example, in televised sport events, such as tennis, the camera lens has been thought of to take on the role of the male gazer. Feminists and others have argued that the camera movements, shots, and/or angles (often operated by men) might be related to the eye of a man and thus representative of his perspective or gaze. This, these critiques argue, may better explain shots of women’s short skirts, long legs, and midriffs. This corresponds with the Rear Window example in the text. The writers say the film “is a quintessential example of a film that depicts the male gaze as a practice in which men look at female bodies, containing them (through the device of the binoculars, for example) and rendering them objects of visual pleasure” (126).