After the tutorial with Sasha, I started to reflect on what questions I exactly wanted to work on. I continue to search for relevant sources, hoping to clarify my logic by gaining a deeper understanding. The mistake I made before was to investigate in the wrong direction and think I was narrowing the question but actually changing the question itself. Sasha argues that the study of body art has changed the whole direction of the previous question. My first objective now is to define the research question and to investigate it in depth.
I did a lot of reading, and one of the academic articles gave me some inspiration. Kelly Oliver from the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University writes in her scholarly report on Laura Mulvey’s reflections：(The use of the [male gaze] as a term can first be traced back to Laura Mulvey’s 1975 book Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. I wrote about her research in my previous blog.)
“Arguably, social media such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Tinder were invented as part of a culture that objectifies and denigrates girls and women, what we might call the culture of the male gaze. It is well known that Facebook founder and Harvard graduate Mark Zuckerberg, now one of the richest men in the world, invented the social media site Facebook to post pictures of girls for his college buddies to rate and berate women. And, Stanford graduate Evan Spiegel, inventor of Snapchat, which is estimated to be worth at least three billion dollars, sent messages during his days in a fraternity referring to women as ‘bitches’, ‘sororisluts’, to be ‘peed on’, and discussed getting girls drunk to have sex with them. The wildly popular hook-up site Tinder, with 1.6 billion ‘swipes’ and 26 million matches a day, has changed the way people ‘date’. Tinder was seeded on college campuses by former University of California students and co-founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen; it has generated new urban slang, ‘tinderslut’ to refer to women who use tinder to hook-up with men. Given the continued use of social media to target, harass, and humiliate young women, even documenting party rape and the sexual assault of unconscious girls, it is telling that all of these technologies were born out of the male gaze and its concomitant symptomology. Facebook and Snapchat were explicitly designed to look at and denigrate women and feed the fantasy of male control of women’s bodies.”
Laura Mulvey argues that women in film were often the object rather than the subject to be gazed at, because one of the factors controlling the camera (and the gaze) came from the assumption that the primary audience for most film genres was heterosexual men. This statement was particularly relevant at a time when Hollywood had an overwhelming number of male leads. And with advances in technology, Kelly argues that Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the male gaze is more relevant now than ever before. And in my previous research in July, I tried to narrow down the question, but in delving deeper I misdirected my research that I focused on the body and self-objectification. I forgot that the key to my initial question was the objectification and sexualisation of the female body by the outside world. Being watched leads women to construct themselves only through the gaze of others, so they use make-up, wear high heels, get breast implants and so on. To a certain extent, they lose their freedom to behave according to their own will, their sense of femininity grows diluted, they lose their own perspective and only look at themselves through a male perspective. The male gaze is the male benefit, which is supported because of the patriarchal structure of society. If women comply with the gaze, they become a “woman” in the sense that men want them to be and are “altruistic” rather than “self-interested”. The self-creativity and irreducible uniqueness of the individual is lost.
Thanks to Sasha’s reminder and advice,I can now clarify the direction of my research. I want to help women escape the influence of the male gaze on the objectification and uniformity of themselves and showcase their own individuality, talents and aptitudes. In the next step I will reconsider whether I can use jewellery design as an intervention and define my final question.
Reference：
- The male gaze is more relevant, and more dangerous, than ever
- Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema（1973) Laura Mulvey, Part of the Language, Discourse, Society book series (LDS)
- Gender Stereotypes in Hollywood Movies and Their Evolution over Time: Insights from Network Analysi (2022) Arjun M. Kumar,Jasmine Y. Q. Goh,Tiffany H. H. Tan andCynthia S. Q. Siew, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117570, Singapore
- A Test of Objectification Theory: The Effect of the Male Gaze on Appearance Concerns in College Women