Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Hetero Media Gaze
- Chapter 2 Queer Gazes and Identifications
- Chapter 3 Film and Commodity
- Chapter 4 Television and Domesticity
- Chapter 5 Documentary and Performance
- Chapter 6 Youth, Realism and Form
- Conclusion
- Select Filmography
- References
- Index
Chapter 1 - The Hetero Media Gaze
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Hetero Media Gaze
- Chapter 2 Queer Gazes and Identifications
- Chapter 3 Film and Commodity
- Chapter 4 Television and Domesticity
- Chapter 5 Documentary and Performance
- Chapter 6 Youth, Realism and Form
- Conclusion
- Select Filmography
- References
- Index
Summary
Clifford T. Manlove (2007), critiques the work of Laura Mulvey as regards the gaze:
What is lacking in Mulvey's use of Freud and Lacan is a theory of the real, a register Lacan attributes to Freud. To begin with, according to Lacan, the gaze is not only an exchange between an active agent and a passive object. The gaze, rather, indicates a prior, more radical split within the apparently active subject. The gaze and its effects, are not gender or biologically specific. From a Lacanian point of view… women often have agency and desire in Hitchcock films, and are subject to castration no less than men.
Manlove's analysis, foregrounding the work of Hitchcock, following a history of many academics who have critiqued, and developed, Mulvey's seminal work (see further below), emphasises a radical split in the apparently active subject. This reveals a sense of ambivalence and dualism, in framing male patriarchal order as controllers of the gaze. Women, or queer men, may be beholders of the gaze, revealing an imagined reversal of the subjectivity.
For example Richard Dyer ([1989] 2000: 124) cites a television advertising campaign for Levi's denim in the late 1980s, which featured a young male actor, Nick Kamen, in a launderette, as marking the beginning of a new period of the consumption of the male body, related as ‘to-be- looked- at- ness’. This can be applied to images of masculinity with regard to both heterosexual female and gay male identifications (Neale 1983), revealing ‘a shift in attitudes towards the male body’ (Dyer [1989] 2000: 123). This is evident where Kamen in the television advert removes his clothes to reveal a well-toned body, dressed only in boxer shorts, having taken most of his clothes off so he may wash his jeans, placing them in the washing machine, accompanied by ‘pebbles’, making them ‘stonewashed’ (a semi-bleached appearance). This is accompanied by a range of onlookers at the launderette, including young teen boys, older males and females, and young teen girls who form the central conduit for viewing, represented as giggling and excited, peering over their magazines to gain a furtive glimpse.
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- Information
- Straight Girls and Queer GuysThe Hetero Media Gaze in Film and Television, pp. 15 - 40Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016