Seminar Two - The Gaze.

• the objectification of women, denying the individual
• looking at others as objects
• Hans Memling 'Vanity'
• viewer is sexually objectifying the women,
• her gaze is being turned back on herself via a mirror, more comfortable looking at it because she isn't returning the gaze
• sexual elements but fundamentally about power - power dynamic
• all artists during this time were men, art production was dominated until the late 20th century
• painted by men for men, can tell because of subject matter
• artistic genre, 'the nude'
• art historians (also men) write about how beautiful this genre is, female form beautiful, more worthy of artistic study. Writing like this disguises its pornographic function
• justifies the male objectification by retaining class and guilt
• not a neutral depiction of the female body but a male fantasy
• traits of female forms, society insists - passive, docile, beautiful, subservience to the male, meek, mild, sex object, wants to be gazed at
• 'vanity' women gazing at herself, mocking the woman even though this idea has been constructed by the male
• This idea is reflected in celebrity culture e.g Katie Price. Presented as stupid, sex object, mocked, vain, characature of female sexuality, wants to appeal to men
• Men made images for men in the past and still do now through the mechanisms of media
• Images from 1863, Manet's 'Olympia' and Cabanel's 'Birth of Venus'
• The Salon, gallery/exhibition in France. Images had to be approved as art
• One image approved (Venus) and one wasn't (Manet)
• all down to the women looking at the viewer, challenging power/confrontational, defensive positioning
• Godess of love in the ancient times, Venus and recent times, prostitute. Different types of sexual power
• scandalised people at the time tasteful to sleazy. Even though one is more like reality
• Manet based his image on Venus of Urbino, 1538
• more relaxed
• more passive
• more romantic
• dog (loyal) to cat (independent)
• domestic maid one looking after the children the other giving the women gifts
• Vue magazine (50's)
• similarities to old new paintings
• reclining pose
• passive meeting of the gaze
• 'my hobby is men'  - made for men
• 'hypnotism: cure for fridgidity' - problem with the woman not the man
• These representations aren't always about sex but social control and keeping women in their place, the domination of women, keeping males higher status within society
• Wonderbra ad 'I can't cook. Who cares?'
• doesn't need domestic qualities because of her sexual beauty
• product is for women
• female power or submissiveness? assertive pose, challenging gaze, powerful, reflects assertive femininity, still successful OR semi naked woman on display, she can't cook so therefore disappointing the man, compensating with sex, illusion of female independence
• successful ad in simultaneously appealing to men and women

Key Words:

• objectification of women
• power
• domination
• control
• passive/submissive vs. dominant/active

Key quotations from 'The Look', Rosalind Coward:

• "Women's experience of sexuality rarely strays far from ideologies and feelings about self image. There's a preoccupation with the visual image - of self and others - and a concomitant anxiety about how these images measure up to a socially prescribed ideal." - because of how women have been portrayed for hundreds of years they now believe this is how they should act.
• "Western culture has become obsessed with looking and recording images of what is seen." - visually dominated society.
• "For looking is not a neutral activity. Human beings don't all look at things in the same way, innocently as it were." - could be referred to the nude art genre.
• "While I don't wish to suggest there's an intrinsically male way of making images, there can be little doubt that the entertainment as w know it is crucially predicated on a masculine investigation of women, and circulation of women's images for men." - entertainment industry dominated by men, created for the male eye, all visual culture aimed towards this, culture is gendered.
• "Women in the flesh, often feel embarrassed. irritated or downright angered by men's persistent gaze." - frail form of power.
• "Those fantasy women stare off the walls with a look of urgent availability." endless fantasy.
• "In this society, looking has become a crucial aspect of sexual relations, not because of any natural impulse, but because it is one of the ways in which domination and subordination are expressed." - appearances are important in our culture, not just a natural reaction but a part of domination.
• "The relations involved in looking enmesh with coercive beliefs about the appropriate sexual behaviour for men and women." - people are forced into dominant and submissive roles.
• "The saturation of society with images of women has nothing to do with men's  natural appreciation of objective beauty, their aesthetic appreciation, and everything to do with and obsessive recording and use of women's images in ways which make men comfortable." - images represent a consistent reminder of male dominance.
• "Clearly this comfort is connected with feeling secure or powerful. And women are bound to this power precisely because visual impressions have been elevated to the position of holding the key to our psychic well-being, our social success, and indeed to whether or not we will be loved." - made to make men feel confident but to make women feel anxious to conform, bringing the fantasy to life because the women feel they need to act this way to be accepted.
• "Men defend their scrutiny of women in terms of the aesthetic appeal of women. But this so-called aesthetic appreciation of women is nothing less than a decided preference for a 'distanced' view of the female body." - easy defence, makes women unobtainable.
• "Perhaps this sex-at-a-distance is the only complete secure relation which men can have with women. Perhaps other forms of contact are to unsettling." - joint anxiety
• "Voyeurism is a way of taking sexual pleasure by looking at rather than being close to a particular object of desire, like a Peeping Tom and Peeping Tom's can always stay in control.
• "Turning back the sheets on the twentieth-century bed, sexology found a spectacle of incompetent fumbling and rampant discontent with 'doing it'." - men don't live up to dominance, created a perverted voyeurism of sex, unobtainable idea, makes both genders discontent.
• "Freud casually added to his account of the development of all humans that women were, however, 'more narcissistic': nor does their need lie in the direction of loving, but of being loved." women are self obsessed.
• "Advertisements, health and beauty advice, fashion tips are effective precisely because somewhere, perhaps even subconsciously, an anxiety, rather than a pleasurable identification, is awakened. We take an interest, yes. But these images do not give back a glow of self-love... The faces that look back imply a criticism." - pressure upon women to be perfect, not innately vein but pushed into being so, contemporary anxieties: diets/corsets/bulimia etc, women must stick to a beauty regime to be beautiful, must by these products in order to have a happy life.
• "Where women's behaviour was previously controlled directly by state, family or church, control of women is now also effected through the scrutiny of women by visual ideals." - historically women were controlled by men and if they stepped out of line they would be punished, but are now controlled by images of other women in circulation, a more mental constraint.