The offline testing method I plan is able to help young women create the self-image they want through make-up. During the make-up process, they also can relax and have a good conversation with me.
I first invited my friends to join the test. We did this activity in a very quiet and uncrowded place. I encouraged her to tell me what her favourite version of herself was without considering anything else and we had a very pleasant and relaxed conversation. I saw a different side of her first time and she found a more comfortable version of herself as well.I was glad to see the results and this offline test is something I think I can apply to my next intervention.
I contacted women of all ages from different industries to find out how they perceive the male gaze on social media and how it impacts them. Four people were interviewed separately, as follows
A: Postgraduate student in Transportation Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Age 22
B:Restaurant Manager, Age 46
C: Ogilvy Shanghai, Account Executive, Age 25
D: Educationalist and Designer, age 38
Evidence of interviews
The inescapable topics are body management, appearance, dressing and fertility rights. Under the male gaze, women are objectified as commodities that can be sold at any time. The value of women themselves is ignored. This is particularly evident for women who have just entered university or society. One interviewee told me that she considered young women to be more valuable reproductive tools, and that when the optimal reproductive age is passed and they lose their youthful appearance and body, they have no value in the eyes of men. This point made me want to try to target young women between the ages of 18-25 in the next intervention.
I created a dedicated Instagram account named “collectingfemalepower” to call on women who have experienced the male gaze in social media, and I hope to gather enough people to create an exclusive community
“Hello everyone, I created this platform to collect female power. I am currently working on a project to help women build their own subjectivity and reduce the objectification of women by the male gaze on social media. If you have had similar experiences as a woman, I hope you will be willing to share them with me. If you are another gender, please leave your valuable comments！”
I have also joined different relevant groups on Facebook, and I plan to observe and count the most frequent discussion topics.
Unfortunately, I only received two responses. Whereas in my first intervention it was relatively easy to obtain data because I actively sought out people in the network, it now seems that waiting for strangers in the network to come forward to give a response is much more difficult. I plan to experiment with a few more different social media platforms, as well as conducting some offline tests.
In the planning of the second intervention, I only considered the part of being objectified by the male gaze and did not consider how to reduce the impact of the male gaze or help women to make changes/show their individuality. Sasha invited me to join a number of relevant Facebook discussion groups, suggesting that I could find stakeholders to interview or observe the topics they discuss on a daily basis.
This suggestion also inspired me to find more target groups and create my own social platform to form project-related group.
I use body parts such as the face, mouth, ears and so on in combination with geometric shapes. This design is intended to present the female under the male gaze of social media not as a complete person but just as a body part existing in a photo/video. I want to be able to interact with the audience at the intervention through AR technology that can be worn virtually.
I will show it to Sasha at the next tutorial and explore the possibility of making them virtual for on-site wear.
In order to further define my intervention and the results of the current analysis, I conducted a questionnaire. I have received 17 responses so far.
As the survey was completed, I could sense from the participants’ feedback that the current online and social environment is oppressive in terms of shaping one’s individuality. Almost all of the participants had experiences of forcing themselves to make changes and compromises in order to fit in with others. They unconsciously considered the mainstream views of society when they wanted to shape and express their individuality, talent and ability. These participants were not unaware of and tired of the effects of this gaze. However, it is often difficult for them to escape this influence. Moreover, this influence is not gender specific and people of all genders are subliminally influenced by the products of a patriarchal society.
With the change in direction of the investigation and the associated research, I use questionnaire for the next step. The aim is to identify the main stakeholders, as well as feedback from multiple groups.
Survey Questions：
What is your age?
What is your gender?
What is your sexual orientation?
Do you have a sense of the presence of the male gaze in the social media？
Are you satisfied with the image you have now?
If you are satisfied with your self-image, do you think your satisfaction results from conforming to your own expectations or to the expectations others have of you? If not, do you feel that your image does not yet match your expectations of yourself, or do you feel that your image is not preferred in mainstream social media?
Do you think the male gaze in mainstream media has had an impact on your self-image definition? (e.g. dissatisfaction with certain body parts, or trying to look cute/sexy/innocent through make-up, etc.)
If the male gaze has influenced you, have these influences made a huge change in shaping your individuality, talent or ability or have they made you passive in the process of shaping your individuality, talent or ability?
Do you ever think about/try to break free from this influence? If so have you found it difficult to change or have you got used to it?
What areas would you like to see improved to help women escape the effects of the male gaze?
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.
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
After previous research and intervention, I began to realise that liberating women’s bodies was not the main focus, it was more about helping women to be consciously free and reducing the influence of the male gaze. I have researched the field of body art in order to find a new way to bring the attention of people not only to the body image of women, but also to their individuality, talent and ability.
1.The Body in Art
The human body is central to how we understand facets of identity such as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. People alter their bodies, hair, and clothing to align with or rebel against social conventions and to express messages to others around them. Many artists explore gender through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative process.
The 1960s and 1970s were a time of social upheavals in the United States and Europe, significant among them the fight for equality for women with regards to sexuality, reproductive rights, the family, and the workplace. Artists and art historians began to investigate how images in Western art and the media—more often than not produced by men—perpetuated idealizations of the female form. Feminist artists reclaimed the female body and depicted it through a variety of lenses. Around this time, the body took on another important role as a medium with which artists created their work.
Carolee Schneemann. Up to and Including Her Limits. 1973-76
2. Male Nude in Art
Most body art involves the female nude, but what about the male nude in art? I started researching this area.
The male nude of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has certainly honed its transgressive verve through the world of out-and-out performance art, as in such noted examples as Keith Boadwee producing video loops depicting himself shooting streams of paint from his anus to create Pollockian painterly marks.
Keith Boadwee
But male nudity has also taken somewhat gentler and tender forms in the art of recent decades. One might think back, for instance, to the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s One Tiger, Eight Breasts, which he published on Twitter in 2010. While the image played on the Western tradition of artists’ portraits with their assistants or models, it emphasised a suitably 2010s notion of equality in its disruption of the perennial power relation between the clothed male artist and the naked female subject. All five of the image’s subjects – including the artist himself – were unclothed.
Such hot-button issues as age and disability have also been addressed in male nudes of the last few decades, the latter by Artur Zmijewski’s large-format photographs and videos showing able-bodied people ‘lending’ a limb to help individuals with physical disabilities to stand, walk and wash. The former, meanwhile, was intriguingly embraced by John Coplans in confrontational black-and-white close-ups of his body dating from his sixties — in the process, defying society’s tendency to disregard old age as ugly and unwelcome.
3. Boundaries of Body Art
Then where is the boundary of body art? In my research, I found that many body art forms are not well accepted and felt the intention of the creator by the audience. I hope that the interventions I make will reach a wider audience and be viewable by children. The reason I’m thinking about this point is I’ve been seeing Acne Studio adverts all over London recently and they don’t give me the desire to buy a handbag. I also think there is no limitation to posting them in the city centre without considering the impact on children and teenagers.
Swedish clothing brand Acne Studios’ new campaign for its Musubi handbags plastered throughout the city, the purses are displayed on the bare behinds of two models who are seen bent over at the waist. The campaign — which features male dancers as the models and was shot by New York City photographer Talia Chetrit — also shows two men embracing with one holding a handbag to cover the other’s exposed derriere. Another model displays full frontal nudity, his knees bent and legs spread, with the purse shielding his privates. The ads have residents debating whether they are artsy or awful.
The influence of fashion magazines on the body image satisfaction of college women: An exploratory analysis, Turner, Sherry L; Hamilton, Heather; Jacobs, Meija; Angood, Laurie M; Deanne Hovde Dwyer, Adolescence; Roslyn Heights Vol. 32, Iss. 127, (Fall 1997): 603-14.
