“Gazing” seems passive, relaxing almost. Pastoral. It is also an amazingly complex interaction between us. What happens when the gaze is aggressively returned?
The “Male Gaze” became a concept most loudly annunciated by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Before her, John Berger, in his work Ways of Seeing (1972), highlighted how traditional Western art positioned women as subjects of male viewers’ gazes, reinforcing a patriarchal visual narrative.
, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts[2] and in literature[3] from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer