Our presentation is about the oppositional gaze, male gaze
and the female gaze. The oppositional gaze is a political rebellion and
resistance against the repression of black people’s right to a gaze. Bell Hooks
mentions how black women were misrepresented in film. Even when representations
of black women were present in film, their bodies and being were there to serve,
to enhance and maintain white womanhood as object of the phallocentric gaze
(degrading). Zanele Muholi, a photographer who has extensively documented
South Africa’s LGBTQ community, has artwork that confronts white supremacy (oppositional
gaze). Muholi’s sitters and sometimes the artist in her own self-portraits—look
directly at us, unflinching and grounded in who they are. Accordingly, hooks’s
assertion that there are layers of power relations embedded within the act of
looking highlights the ways in which this act is reflexive: it works both for
the looker and those who are looked upon. The
Examples of Oppositional Gaze:
Characters 
VoicesThe male gaze is viewing art from man's point of view. It is comprised of how men view women on art. John Berger analyzes mostly women as nude, as seen by the spectator. The spectator, who is usually a man, is geared to see a woman in art as an object that he owns. The male gaze considers these three perspectives:
- The spectator
- the person behind the camera
- the characters within the film artwork
These perspective place the male as the dominant
figure with the inferior characters looking to the male as superior.
The male gaze is a theory that is portrayed to be
where a male artist is painting or viewing their women as an object, sometimes
in a sexual manner, instead of people. They tend to use these women to give
pleasure to the ones who are seeing these women by showing off their curves,
and body. This is seen in many movies where the camera is zoomed in to a part
of a women’s.
Examples of Male Gaze:
Soey Milk Artwork:
Angela Fraleigh Artwork:
The female gaze is the way in which the visual arts and literature depict the world and men from a feminine point of view, presenting men as objects of female pleasure. The idea of the female gaze is most definitely not to take the place of the male gaze but to break down the barriers caused by this male dominant culture. This means that the female gaze aims to destroy all gazes and emanate pure equality from the film industry. The female gaze makes the female the subject instead of an object in art. In Seeing Red, Paloma Montoya paints the same ponytailed boxer 10 times, capturing how she continues to fight even after she is bruised and bleeding. That fierce intensity is part of the female experience, too. United by a shared feminist focus, the art in this show manages to be not-male without being anti-male. Instead, it explores other ways of looking at the world and emphasizes the value in that diversity of perspectives.
Overall, the female gaze opposes the male gaze where
it’s seen in a feminist perspective, the female gaze respects women by
emphasizing their beauty instead of objecting them and making them feel
uncomfortable. It’s emphasizes a way of feeling seeing, showing how it is to be
an object of the gaze, and returning the gaze.
Examples of Female Gaze:
Seeing Red
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