Define gaze | Dictionary and Thesaurus

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In fact, for Antonioni this gazing is probably the mostfundamental of all cognitive activities ... (from Thinking in the Absence of Image)To stare at.1667: Strait toward Heav'n my wondring Eyes I turnd, / Andgaz'd a while the ample Skie — John Milton, Paradise Lost (bookVIII)TranslationsTo stare intently or earnestlyExtensive DefinitionThe concept of gaze (often also called the gazeor, in French, le regard), in analysing visualculture, is one that deals with how an audience views the peoplepresented. The concept of the gaze became popular with the rise ofpostmodern philosophyand social theory and was first discussed by 1960s French intellectuals, namelyMichelFoucault's description of the medical gazeand Lacan'sanalysis of the gaze's role in the mirror stagedevelopment of the human psyche.This concept is extended in the framework of feminist theory,where it can deal with how men look at women, how women look atthemselves and other women, and the effects surrounding this. Inaddition, the concept of the "normativegaze" is used by critical theorists such as Cornel Westto describe the way in which the idea of Eurocentric racialidentity provides the lens through which other races are viewed andsocially constructed. Laura Mulveycriticized such gazes (in films) as "male". Arising in the contextof artistic practice, psychoanalysis andFrenchfeminism, BrachaEttinger's notion of the feminine "matrixial gaze" contributesto the contemporary debates concerning the gaze in art.Forms of gazeThe gaze can be characterised by who is doingthe looking:The spectator'sgaze: the spectator who is viewing the text. This is often us, theaudience of a certaintext.Intra-diegeticgaze, where one person depicted in the text is looking at anotherperson or object in the text, such as one character looking atanother.Extra-diegetic gaze, where the person depicted in the textlooks at the spectator, such as an aside, or an acknowledgement ofthe fourth wall.The camera's gaze,which is the gaze of the camera, and is often equated to thedirector'sgaze.These are not the only forms of gaze. Other forms includethe gaze of an audience within a "text within the text", such asLisaSimpson and Bart Simpsonwatching the cartoon-within-a-cartoon Itchyand Scratchy on TheSimpsons, or editorial gaze, whereby a certain aspect of thetext is given emphasis, such as in photography, where a captionor a cropping of an image depicting one thing can emphasize acompletely different idea.Other theorists such as GuntherKress and Theo vanLeeuwen provide the idea of the gaze as a relationship betweenoffering and demanding gaze: indirect gaze is an offer by thespectator, where we initiate the gaze, and the subject is not awareof this, and direct gaze is a demand by the subject, who looks atus, demanding our gaze.Gaze can also be further categorised into thedirection of the gaze, where the subjects are looking at eachother, apart, at the same object, or where one is gazing at anotherwho is gazing at something else.Effects of gazeGazing and seeing someone gaze upon anotherprovides us with a lot of information about our relationship to thesubjects, or the relationships between the subjects upon whom wegaze, or the situation in which the subjects are doing thegazing.The mutuality of the gaze can reflect powerstructure, or the nature of a relationship between thesubjects, as proposed by CatherineLutz and Jane Collins, where this "tell[s] us who has the rightand/or need to look at whom".Although it may appear that "gaze" is merelylooking at, JonathanSchroeder tells us that "it signifies a psychologicalrelationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the objectof the gaze". The gaze characterizes and displays the relationshipsbetween the subjects by looking.This idea forms a basis of feminist analysis oftexts.Gaze and feminist theoryLauraMulvey, in her essay "VisualPleasure and Narrative Cinema", introduced the concept of thegaze as a symptom of power asymmetry, hypothesizing about what shecalled the "male gaze." The theory of the male gaze has been hugelyinfluential in feministfilm theory and in mediastudies.The defining characteristic of the male gaze isthat the audience is forced to regard the action and characters ofa text through the perspective of a heterosexual man; the cameralingers on the curves of the female body, and events which occur1to women are presented largely in the context of a man's reactionto these events. The male gaze denies women agency,relegating them to the status of objects. The female reader orviewer must experience2 the narrative secondarily, byidentification with the male.Mulvey's essay was one of the first to articulatethe idea that sexism can exist not only in the content of a text,but in the way that text is presented, and in its implicationsabout its expected audience.Some theorists also have noted the degrees towhich persons are encouraged to gaze upon women in advertising, sexualizing thefemale body even in situations where female body has nothing to dowith the product being advertised.1. It is worth noting a distinction between anevent and amalgamation of abstract causes, i.e., things,directions, responses. 2. It is worth noting that experience is notrequired to participate in the culture; socio-contextuality willpertain more from the vantage of lawfulness over its transpersonalregards.Responses to "male gaze"Male gaze in relation to feministtheory presents asymmetrical gaze as a means of exhibiting anunequal power relationship; that is, the male imposes an unwantedgaze upon the female. While some argue that women who fit the idealof female beauty enjoy this gaze, many second-wave feminists wouldargue whether these women are actually willing, noting that theymay be merely seeking to conform to the hegemonic norms constructed tothe benefit of male interests that further underline the power ofthe male gaze. (see also exhibitionism)The question of whether a female gaze exists to ameaningful extent in contrast to the male one arises naturally inconsidering the male gaze. Mulvey, the originator of the phrase"male gaze", argues that "the male figure cannot bear the burden ofsexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze...". Nalini Pauldescribes WideSargasso Sea, where the character Antoinette views Rochesterand places a garlandupon him to appear as a hero, and "Rochester does not feelcomfortable with having this role enforced upon him; thus herejects it by removing the garland and crushing the flowers."In the perspective of male gaze as merelypossessing a gaze, the position of a female possessing the gaze isthen the female assuming the male gaze. Eva-MariaJacobsson supports this by describing a "female gaze" as "amere cross identification with masculinity".However, disregarding the viewpoint of genderedpossession of gaze as proposed by Mulvey above, there is evidenceto support a view of a female gaze — at least as an objectificationof men — in texts such as advertisements and teenmagazines.The gaze can also be directed toward members ofthe same gender for several reasons, not all of which are sexual,such as in comparison of body image orin clothing.Gaze and psychoanalysisThe French psychoanalyst JacquesLacan, an early and influential theorist of childdevelopment, found the concept of the gaze important in what hetermed "the mirror stage", whereupon children gaze at a mirror image of themselves(usually an image of themselves in an actual mirror, but a twin brother or sister can alsofunction as a mirror image) and use this image to derive a degreeof coordination over their physical movements. Lacan thereforelinked the concept of the gaze to the development of individualhumanagency. To this end, he transformed the concept of the gazeinto a dialectic between what he called the ideal-ego and the ego-ideal. The ideal-egois the image of imaginary self-identification - in other words, theidealized image that the person imagines themselves to be oraspires to be; whilst the ego-ideal is the imaginary gaze ofanother person who gazes upon the ideal-ego. An example would be ifa famous rockstar(a category of identification which would function as theideal-ego) secretly hoped that the school bully who tormented themas a child was now aware of his or her subsequent success andfame(with the imaginary, fantasmatic figure of the bully functioning asthe ego-ideal).Lacan later developed his concept of the gazeeven further, claiming that the gaze does not belong to the subjectbut, rather, the object. In his Seminar One, he told his audience:"I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do notsee, not even discern. All that is necessary is for something tosignify to me that there may be others there. This window, if itgets a bit dark, and if I have reasons for thinking that there issomeone behind it, is straight-away a gaze" (Lacan, 1988, p.215).Starting from 1985, the artist and psychoanalystBrachaL. Ettinger has developed the idea of the "matrixial gaze"based upon her articulation of particular feminine subjectivizingprocesses, patterned upon the real of pregnancy conceived as ashareable unconscious "borderspace" for affective, phantasmatic andtraumatic differentiation in co-emergence and co-fading of partialsubjects in jointness. The idea of the matrixial gaze has opened anew horizon for thinking aesthetics and ethics from the angle offeminine subjectivizing agency. The art historians GriseldaPollock and Catherinede Zegher developed readings of art history and contemporaryart based on Ettinger's notion of matrixial gaze and screen. In the2000s, Ettinger developed also the idea of a primary aestheticalaffect she has named "fascinance" (in opposition to Lacan's "fascinum"),by which the infant has psychic access and primary knowledge of theother and the world. This is a creative and transformationalgaze.See alsoFilmtheoryFeministfilm theoryEyetrackerEyecontactEvileyeStaringcontestAudiencetheoryReferencesArmstrong, Carol and de Zegher, Catherine, Women Artists at theMillennium. MIT Press, October Books, 2006.Ettinger, Bracha L., "The Matrixial Gaze" (1994) reprinted asChapter 1 in: The Matrixial Borderspace. University of MinnesotaPress, 2006.Ettinger, Bracha L., "Com-passionate Co-response-ability,Initiation in Jointness, and the link x of Matrixial Virtuality".In: Gorge(l). Oppression and relief in Art. Edited by Sofie VanLoo. Royal Museum of Fine Art. Antwerpen, 2006.Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Lacan: On the Gaze." IntroductoryGuide to Critical Theory - see External links.Florence, Penny and Pollock, Griselda, Looking back to theFuture. G B Arts, 2001.Jacobsson, Eva-Maria: A Female Gaze? (1999) - see ExternallinksKress, Gunther Theo van Leeuwen: Reading Images: TheGrammar of Visual Design. (1996)Lacan, Jacques: Seminar One: Freud's Papers On Technique (1988)Lacan, Jacques:Seminar Eleven: The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis. NY London, W.W. Norton and Co., 1978.Lutz, Catherine Jane Collins: The Photograph as anIntersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic. (1994)Mulvey, Laura: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975,1992)Pollock, Griselda (Ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image.Blackwell, 2006Notes on The Gaze (1998) - see External links.Paul, Nalini: The Female Gaze - see External linksSchroeder, Jonathan E: Consuming Representation: A VisualApproach to Consumer Research.Theory, Culture and Society, Volume 21, Number 1, 2004.de Zegher, Catherine, Inside the Visible. MIT Press,1996.External linksThis is NotSex: A Web Essay on the Male Gaze, Fashion Advertising, and thePose, web essay about the male gaze in advertisingNotes on TheGazeRobertDoisneau, Un regard Oblique, 1948 - another effectivephotograph illustrating gazeThe MaleGaze, with photographs of several advertisements.Modules on Lacan: On the GazeTheFemale GazeSalonLife - The Female GazeAux Fenêtres del'âme (Windows of the Soul), a Ron Padova filmgaze in French: Regardgaze in Russian: Взглядgaze in Ukrainian: Погляд (зір)Synonyms, Antonyms and RelatedWordsadmire,be amazed, be astonished, be vigilant, be watchful, bedroom eyes,bore, come-hither look,contemplate,crane, crane the neck,evil eye, eye, eyeball, follow, gape, gaup, gawk, gaze at, gaze open-mouthed,glad eye, glare, gloat, glower, glowering look, goggle, have a looksee, hold inview, inspect, keep insight, keep in view, keep under observation, look, look after, look at, look on,look upon, malocchio,marvel, observe, ogle, peek, peep, peer, penetrating look, reconnoiter, regard, rubberneck, scout, scrutinize, see, spy upon, stand aghast, standon tiptoe, stare, stareat, stare down, stare hard, stare openmouthed, survey, view, watch, whammy, wonder

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