OUGD501: Context of Practice 2 - The Gaze and The Media Seminar

Our fourth seminar of the Context of Practice 2 module, focused upon the topics and themes which we discussed in the  lecture.

We began the seminar by discussing the main topics within the lecture.

• Voyeurism (Freud)
• Sexual desire
• Visual culture (Art and Media)
• Looking is not neutral
• "Men act, women appear" (Berger 1972) - Men have a purpose and power, women are more like objects than people, there to be looked at
• In our society, visual representation is skewed 

Vanity

• It's alright to look at the woman because she is looking at herself.
• Impossible view of the woman

• Men were in charge of wealth
• Art was produced by men, for men - as all art was

• Male fantasy of a woman, make the man feel more secure about his own sexuality
• Woman never argues back or confronts you
• Never meets your gaze but has a sideways glance, to invite you to keep looking
• Having it both ways - Sexualising a woman, but laughing at her for being vain

Birth of Venus, 1863

• Most popular picture in the 'Salon'
• Figure is passive, is looking away
• Everything is on display 
• Flirtatious 
• Fantasy
• Myth of sexual fantasies

Manet, Olympia 1863

• Cause Scandal 
• Figure is more confrontation than the figure in Birth of Venus
• Figure is covering herself up
• Prostitute
• Image represents the sordid reality
• Reality of sexual fantasies 
• To challenge the world view
• Black cat - shows independence

• Repression
• Pigeon holing women into certain roles, how to act - it is the womans job to look good for the man

• Tradition of women being sexually available , encouraging the man to look at her - 21st Century visual culture

• Surrounded by the images of the ideal female beauty

• To be naked is to be oneself, to be nude is to appear naked and yet not to be seen as yourself, to be a nude is to be a object.

• To confirm our own sense of self we tend to look at people as objects.

Task:

Choose and analyse any one image which represents the system of gender relations, power and domination discussed in the lecture and seminar, use five quotes from 'The Look' in support of your analysis.

One advertisement which demonstrates the system of gender relations within the media is the 2013 campaign for the video game, Grand Theft Auto V which features a female rumored to be American actress and model Kate Upton posing on a beach wearing only a bikini.

One of the themes discussed in Rosalind Coward’s ‘The Look’ is the theory proposed by Freud that females are the more narcissistic sex “Freud casually added to his account of the development of all humans that women were, however, ‘more narcissistic’”. In fine art paintings, such as Hans Memling’s ‘Vanity’ a mirror would be used as a symbol of this vanity. This trait is almost mimicked within the advertisement for GTA V in which the model is holding a mobile phone, with her body language and pose suggesting she is taking a photograph of herself.

Another trait used with many paintings is this idea of the female ‘gaze’ with the suggestion that if the female is looking away she is not challenging the ‘gaze’ and is therefore inviting the audience to look at her. “Those women on the billboards, though; they look back. Those fantasy women stare off the walls with a look of urgent availability”. Although the figure in the advertisement is not looking away completely, she has this sideways glance, almost as if to see if we are still looking at her, and inviting us to do so.

Due to the widespread availability of these images, which feature some sort of ‘fantasy figure’ seemingly inviting men to look at them and not challenging their gaze there is a preference towards the fantasy over the reality. “Thus the profusion of images of women which characterizes contemporary society could be seen as an obsessive distancing of women, a form of voyeurism. 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 Toms can always stay in control”. This idea of “sex-at-a-distance” as discussed by Coward, comes from this need, by men, to be in control. By distancing themselves from the woman and instead admiring her from a distance she can be thought of as an object, not a person.

In order to sell products, the industry takes advantage of this preference for the fantasy over the reality in to fuel consumer culture. “Advertising in this society builds precisely on the creation of an anxiety”.  Video games, such as Grand Theft Auto, are particular example of this, as the premise of the game if to live this fantasy lifestyle where you can get any woman you want rather than engaging in real life.