Gaze

That night, I find I want this beauty to last because it seems more powerful than any beauty I’ve had before. Being pretty like this is stronger than any drug I’ve tried (6). Despite this positive viewpoint, Chee has also felt uncomfortable under the gaze at certain points, which still plays an important role in the overall experience of being viewed. The loving attention he receives while walking down the street can easily take a dark turn, and in his writing, he acknowledges there is always…

Bluest Eye and Between the World and Me share a similar storyline of the black body being destroyed by the “white” gaze. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison chooses to use a single character, Pecola Breedlove, to adeptly depict how one 's body can become a subject of discrimination. After being impregnated by her own father, the entire town ridicules Pecola. She must now face the harsh gaze of an entire town that is convinced that Pecola is the ugliest girl possible. The town’s ideologies stem from…

In today’s media, specifically music videos, there are quite often distinct gender representations. This is shown in the music video “Girls on Film” by Duran Duran. This music video was published in 1981, expected to be played at night clubs and the “Play Boy” channel (Girls on Film, n.d., para. 4). The raunchy video created an uproar, and it was consequently banned by the BBC and heavily edited for MTV (Girls on Film, n.d., para. 4). This caused the band to gain more spot light and furthermore,…

Exercise 4: Gesture and Gaze in Conversational Storytelling In order to make their narrative more plausible and detailed, many will use more than just a verbal account to illustrate their stories. Instead, they use gazes and gestures. In conversational storytelling, which is a collaborative event, gestures have meaningful functions that are tied to the description of the story. Simply defined, a gesture is the movement of the body that expresses a thought or feeling. In the video-recorded…

film. We have come to expect is that women are passive, sexual objects whose role in film revolves around a male gaze. “Babylon” by Mad Men reinforces this portrayal of women through the ‘Male Gaze’ as argued by Laura Mulvey and hyper-sexualization, argued by Phillips & Strobol. sThere are two examples in “Babylon” that I am going to discuss that support Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze and its implications on female roles. The female body in “Babylon” is continually presented as an object…

object activate film and image. Liu claims there are two spectators in this work, Sherman, as she became the female spectator of 1950s style Hollywood films and the female spectators that gaze at Sherman’s works. Liu extensively used Sherman’s quotes as evidence for her ideas, against the arguments about the male gaze as being the reason for these stills. Liu, using one of Sherman’s quotes, mentioned that Sherman photographed these stills based on her own feminine experiences, which is harder…

put together symbolize the straight female. In a heteronormative world, this is what it means to be beautiful and sexually available. Thus, the male gaze is ubiquitous in culture of the past and present. This contributes to narrow and unrealistic cultural beauty standards. However, Madonna, a famous singer, made a career by toying with the male gaze. Although Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video initially presents itself as a dip into feminism, a more analytical…

if you think along the lines that men are perfect and females are the imperfect ones because of this” castration theory”. In the movie Lisa Freemont is anything but helpless and incapable despite movies characterization of her as an object of male gaze, she is experienced as an overwhelmingly powerful presence.Lisa 's dominance in…

I travel the St. Louis-Boston air route on an almost weekly basis. At times Boston Transportation Security Administration (TSA) stops me. Every time I am being stopped, I end up exhausted, confused and even a bit shaky. As I get prepared to cross the TSA security checkpoint the rush starts. I tend to feel somehow naked. A sensation I believe might be shared with those who actually did strip naked to show TSA screeners that they were not carrying a bomb, as John Brennan did in 2012. Once all…

Anthony, J, and I chose two still ads from the same cologne line, over a decade apart. The line is “Le Male” by Jean Paul Gaultier, and the two ads that we chose are pictured below. Our task was to analyze the “gayness” of the advertisement, and therefore to also analyze what wasn’t gay about it. To do this, we collectively did research about the history of the content of the ads, the brand and the creator of it, and the models used. Lastly, we analyzed the aesthetics of the ad to pull it all…