Author: Yadi Wang

I conducted more research on relevant campaign and artists, trying to find out how they started the campaign/created the artworks.

1.The #freethenipple campaign

Founded by artist and activist Lina Esco in 2013, the Free The Nipple campaign addresses the sexualisation and censorship of women’s breasts. The campaign aims to achieve the right for women to bare their chests in Western nations where going topless is largely discouraged and criminalised, unless in a “sexual environment” such as a strip club. Thus, the campaign seeks to interrupt patriarchal framings of the breast as inherently sexual and the associated practices of concealment and censorship. The organisers describe the movement as “a mission to empower women across the world” (Free the Nipple 2016). 

However, the movement’s potency was seen to be subsumed by a culture of objectification and sexualisation, and the imagery and mechanisms of the movement were argued to in fact fuel objectification and male gaze rather than subvert it. The concern in this line of thought was not necessarily that the desexualisation of women’s breasts is impossible, but that it is not possible in the society at this time or in this way. This was particularly evident in one comment from a user in a thread about Free The Nipple in a feminist discussion group;

I support the movement in principle, but the fine line it treads between liberation and titillation makes me really uncomfortable … I can’t help but feel like the disrespectful objectification of women’s bodies is part of a much grander system of oppression towards women and if we want to genuinely #freethenipple, first we have to #freethewoman

It became clear that a lot of the people in the group shared this belief and regrettable concern that the movement is premature in a society in which women’s bodies are so heavily objectified. Whilst it was agreed that objectification is a great concern for feminists, the Free The Nipple movement was not seen as effective in tackling this issue.

This image symbolises concerns held by a range of users over the possibility that the Free The Nipple movement may reinforce the male gaze rather than subvert or disrupt it. Another user nuances the debate by introducing the concept of “male entitlement”:

There are many reasons why women as of now, don’t wish to free our nipples, probably [because] you haven’t even gotten to the core problem which is that men feel entitled to and find women’s bodies inherently sexual, why would you tell women to free their nipples when you know most men aren’t even close to being at the level of respect and progress in which the average women can ‘free her nipple’ without some type of harassment or unwanted attention from annoying men … women’s nipples are consistently still going to be in a sexualised format due to porn and adverts

2. Sarah Lucas

Sarah Lucas is a visual artist born in England in 1962 and a member of YBAS. Her work combines eroticism and humour, using photographs, collages and ready-made installations to express bodies and organs in a frank and crude way, deliberately challenging existing sexual and gender stereotypes. Lucas often uses critical humour in her work to question conventions and highlight the absurdity of everyday life. Her famous series of self-portraits explores androgynous temperaments, yet her work is never autobiographical, but presents a perspective influenced by post-Freudian social theory and feminism.

“Inspired by feminist Andrea Dworkin and books on pornography and sexuality, Lucas tackles the objectification of the female body by men and how women’s ‘sexual liberation’ encourages their unintentional submissiveness. By appropriating masculine metaphors and gender constructs, she confronts and dissects them. sculptures do not portray women as beautiful, as Cindy Sherman did before her. portrays women as beautiful, but rather uses the casual misogyny of everyday life as fuel to construct visual puns to counter stereotypes of women”Reflection

3. Conclusion

I think I need to be very aware of the ‘boundaries’ in the next interventions that I am planning. Sarah’s work has inspired me to perhaps focus less on the body and more on the female ideology.Although as women we have the same body parts, each woman has her own different individuality, talents and abilities. As mentioned earlier, more important than the freedom of the female body is the freedom of the female mind.

Reference：

1. #freethenipple – digital activism and embodiment in the contemporary feminist movement

In the age of social media, hundreds of millions of photos fly around the world every day and a person can take a quick excursion through social media to thousands of photos/videos in a single day. At the same time most to images are the product of the male gaze and influencing women in a silent way. The art critic John Berger once said that women’s grooming and self-expression in public space is not really up to them – “men act, women behave. Men look at women, women see themselves being looked at by men”.  Filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey first coined the term “the male gaze” in her seminal 1973 paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and she wrote that “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female.” The male gaze, on the other hand, is always in the ascendancy of power. It is embedded in advertising, popular culture, the teachings of parents and teachers, the rules of public space, and even our own expectations of ourselves, and it influences the way we dress, behave and talk (men, women and children) all the time.

Sexual fantasy is one of the most important drivers of the male gaze. In Feminist Philosophy of Art (2008), the scholar A.W. Eaton defines the male gaze as ‘the act of objectifying women with the male gaze for sexual pleasure’. In the male gaze, the woman is often an object that lacks subjectivity, and the female body becomes the scene of the viewer’s sexual fantasies. Thus, the process of ‘gazing’ or ‘looking’ at women often turns into a process of male gratification of his sexual fantasies. In this process, the viewer not only satisfies aesthetic pleasure, but also derives sexual pleasure from it.

A breakdown of the different scenes of the male gaze reveals them in different ways. But there are two types of inherent tensions that can be said to permeate most acts of the male gaze. The first is that although the male gaze is ubiquitous, it is very often accomplished through ‘voyeurism’. Voyeurism is not necessarily a sneaky act, such as peeking at a girl’s body in the underground. Film theorist Christian Metz has made the point that voyeurism is actually an act of viewing that is predominantly imagined and supplemented by voyeurism. The second point is that although the apparent object of the male gaze is a woman, the person to whom it is ultimately directed is in fact the gaze itself. When men admire women’s appearance, not only do women’s breasts, legs and buttocks bring sexual satisfaction and then pleasure, but being in the position of the ‘gazer’ also satisfies men’s identity or masculinity and brings them pleasure.

Whether it is the process of voyeurism or self-identification, they all have one thing in common: they embody the inequality of power relations. This is why the ‘male gaze’ can be seen everywhere, and the underlying problem is precisely the inequality between men and women.

In A Women Looking at Men Looking at Women, author Siri Hustvedt says: “There are two types of female gaze, one that follows patriarchal logic, that is, the gaze of women looking at women through the glasses of the male gaze, and the other is subversive, feminist, a gaze that that dares to confront patriarchal culture and requires a great deal of self-reflection.

In contemporary society, how far can women express themselves without being swayed by the male gaze? What is the relationship between jewellery design and gender? How can jewellery design be used in reality and help young women to reduce the objectifying influence of the male gaze?

Reference：

1.Adriana,M., Manago, L., Monique, Ward, Kristi,M., Lemm, Lauren,Reed, Rita Seabrook.(2015). Facebook Involvement, Objectified Body Consciousness, Body Shame, and Sexual Assertiveness in College Women and Me. Sex Roles volume 72, pages1–14.
2.Arjun,M., Kumar, Jasmine, Y. Q., Goh, Tiffany, H. H., Tan, Cynthia, S. Q., Siew. (2022). Gender Stereotypes in Hollywood Movies and Their Evolution over Time: Insights from Network Analysi. Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117570, Singapore.
3.Fredrickson, B. L., Roberts, T. A., Noll, S. M., Quinn, D. M., & Twenge, J. M. (1998). That swimsuit becomes you: Sex differences in self-objectification, restrained eating, and math performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 269–284.
4.Kelly, Oliver. (2017). The male gaze is more relevant, and more dangerous, than ever. New Review of Film and Terlevision studies. VOL. 15, No. 4, 451-455.
5.Laura,Mulvey. (1973). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Part of the Language, Discourse, Society book series (LDS).
6.Rachel, M., Calogero. (2004). A Test of Objectification Theory: The Effect of the Male Gaze on Appearance Concerns in College Women. The College of William and Mary.