Category: Project 4.2 The gaze in the digital age

Desperately Seeking Difference by Jackie Stacey

I found this essay fascinating. It is a question that my husband and I have often discussed – “How do I react to films compared to how he reacts?” As a fairly strong feminist my reaction is often anger and frustration at how women are portrayed in film. The female is subjective subservient and fawning while the male is the power suited successful business man or warrior. So my opinion would be in general agreement with the research discussed in the essay.Desperately Seeking Difference by Jackie Stacey

The two films discussed in the paper All About Eve and Desperately Seeing Susan are films that treat the gaze of one female on another. The male roles are minor. The films are interesting in that they are not straightforward lesbian films or at least the lesbian theme is clouded in a sort of ambitious desire to be the other person rather than be with the other person.

All about Eve is directed and produced by two males while Desperately Seeking Susan has two females as director and producer.  I would have liked to see this aspect discussed in the paper. Would this have made a difference to how the films were presented? Many lesbian films are produced and directed by men. I find this astonishing and I believe this is done to interpret female to female relationships in the manner of how men see them – with a male gaze.

Male and females are different and how we see and interpret images and film sequences are different. I believe these differences should be celebrated and discussed not criticised. We attended the wedding of two great lesbian friends, a couple of years ago. We were among very few ‘straight’ guests. The atmosphere was different from heterosexual weddings. There seemed, to me, a softer more loving atmosphere. Another heterosexual wedding we attended, in NewYork, consisted of a majority homosexual guests. The bride was a photographer…. My husband ‘gave her away’. It was memorable and I usually hate weddings! We should strive to understand how each other ‘see’ the world around us. Inevitably it will be different and not necessarily based on sexual orientation. My sister sees our childhood totally differently to how I see and remember it.

We are a complicated species but it is our differences that make us interesting.

Project 4.2 The gaze in the digital age

Really interesting and relevant topic today with all that is being said and written about the #MeToo movement. I started to watch Lady Macbeth last night but became so physically revolted, by the use of the male gaze to disempower Lady Macbeth, that I stopped watching it. He ordered her to strip naked and stand with her face to the wall while he masturbated. The film was beautifully filmed from the short amount that I watched. But the story was so upsetting that I could not watch it to the end.

Reading again Sturken & Cartwright’s summary of Lacan’s writing, on the male gaze, I was once again angry and frustrated by how things used  to be and in many cases still are. Women were the possessions of men, to be looked at like objects rather than human beings. The Lady Macbeth film brought this idea back. Manet’s bar maid image is a classic with the top hat wearing, sneering, male in the corner is typical of its time. But a statistic yesterday on the radio stated that 80% of housework and childrearing is still done by women. Plus ça change plus ça reste la même.

Our college notes continue with the premise that things changed in the 1970s with the arrival of feminism. I was a strong supporter of the movement in my college days but I was not aware of any seismic change in male attitudes. In college we, science students, thread a very difficult path between our studies and being ‘attractive’ to our male colleagues. My father continually reminded me that I would never find a husband if I continued to be a scientist,’ a blue stocking’, he called it. But inside I knew I was never going to be anyone’s ‘chattel’. I loved working in the laboratory. I loved being only one of two female students. I loved when I was treated as one of the guys. But this happened rarely.

Advertising in the 1970s still used female models as objects. The aim of most women was to be slim and beautiful, not happy and intelligent. We women needed to know our place which was still in the kitchen, tied to the cooker or the sink. Advertising for washing and cleaning products showed smiling housewives in their kitchens using whatever the product that was being advertised. We never saw a male doing the washing. Were we, the female viewers, upset by this? Of course we were but we did not seem to be making a lot of progress on change. But we had and raised our daughters and sons to be different.

This brings us on to the “Smile you are on camera” section.Michel Foucault’s theory that we, both male and female, are being subdued into ‘good’ behaviour because we are being continually watched, ‘panopticism’. CCTV cameras are ubiquitous. Google vans are continually creating and re-creating images of our living spaces so we can Globally Position our way around the world. In doing so they have captured thousands of compromising images. A number of these were mentioned in the notes. Two of them I was very familiar with. Mishka Henner and David Thomas Smith. I like their work. The other two photographers mentioned, Michael Wolf, Jon Rafman I looked up.

Michael Wolf produced a series of images using Google images entitled “A series of Unfortunate events” (1). I found this totally uninteresting. Google van made the images and he used his time trawling through the street view of these images to find these events. I found the image of the people who had fallen or were involved in accidents intrusive, the rest were uninteresting. Who wants to see a man doing his business behind a car – voyeuristic or what….. I am not apparently the only person who found this work distasteful. Wolf was an unpopular winner of the World Press Photo Competition (2)

Jon Rafman’s Google found images were described as ‘weird (3). I did not find them either weird or beautiful. I found them boring.

The reading recommendation was a lot more interesting for me.

Desperately Seeking Difference by Jackie Stacey.

I have written up my thoughts on this paper in a sub heading of this project.

  1. Wolf M. 2014, A Series of Unfortunate Events, lensCulture, retrieved 7 April 2019, <https://www.lensculture.com/articles/michael-wolf-a-series-of-unfortunate-events&gt;
  2. British Journal of Photography. 2019. Michael Wolf, photographer, 1954-2019 – British Journal of Photography. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.bjp-online.com/2019/05/obituary-michael-wolf-photographer-1954-2019/?utm_campaign=Newsletter%20Emails%202019&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=72549818&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_pOW_yifhVGxLVozisTlX7PdACZ5zP7eZWCHV_pAKfHSOVX3R7CQDmqekFz5ilMaxzON0BhL0wHWQczjTJGWf3jht6Sw&_hsmi=72578113. [Accessed 13 May 2019].
  3. Garfield L. 2016, 29 weird and beautiful images found on Google Street View, Business Insider, retrieved 7 April 2019, <https://www.businessinsider.com/google-street-view-photos-artist-jon-rafman-2016-9?r=US&IR=T#to-find-the-most-interesting-images-hes-been-mining-through-googles-photos-for-years-he-says-he-enjoys-being-a-virtual-explorer-2&gt;

.