Related Events I Attended

1.Goldsmiths’ Fair 2022

Goldsmiths’ Fair is an annual selling event and exhibition showcasing a curated selection of work by some of the best fine jewellers and contemporary silversmiths creating and making in the UK today. I visited the day before it ended. The whole fair gathered dozens of artists, using different craft/techniques to create their work. One artist I really liked, Jed Green, was also in attendance, she works with a combination of glass and metal.She also had a project in collaboration with two other female jewellery designers that inspired me.

2.Drink your imagination

Interesting workshop! Never had a way to drink my imagination down, even though it didn’t taste too good haha. I think this is a good example of workshop that can be used as a reference for my third intervention.

Related Exhibitions I visited (2)

1. London Design Festival – PEARL

Caroline Broadhead’s work in this exhibition caught my eye. She has an interesting combination of woven metal and pearls. The artist told me that she has always been concerned with objects that come into contact and interact with the body, exploring the external range of the body through light, shadow, reflection and movement.

2. V&A AFRICA FASHION

This exhibition looks back at the history of fashion in Africa, including the women’s equal rights movement and feminist designs. This exhibition gave me an insight into feminist design in Africa, unfortunately there was less jewellery design related to it rather than the majority of clothing design. However, through the evolution of patterns, shapes and so on, I could fully appreciate the power of feminist design

Related Exhibitions I visited (1)

1. Carolee Schneemann, Body Politics

Schneemann was a radical artist who remains a feminist icon and point of reference for numerous contemporary artists to this day. Addressing urgent topics from sexual expression and the objectification of women to human suffering and the violence of war, her work is concerned with the precarious lived experience of humans and animals. The artist has created many groundbreaking art/performances using her own body as a medium. Many of her exhibited works explore the sexualisation and objectification of women and have inspired me on how to improve body image in my project.

Carolee Schneemann | Body Politics | Barbican | Hales Gallery
Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics” at Barbican Art Gallery, London - Mousse  Magazine - News - PPOW

2. Soheila Sokhanvari, Rebel Rebel

Rebel Rebel, the first major UK commission by Iranian artist Soheila Sokhanvari, celebrates and commemorates feminist icons from pre-revolutionary Iran. As I enter the Curve Gallery at the Barbican, I am greeted by the songs of Googoosh. It is her bittersweet story – a story of punishment, persecution, imprisonment and exile, but also of perseverance, unquenchable creativity and defiance – that becomes the story of almost all the women who appear in Sokhanvari’s exquisite miniatures. The walls of the entire gallery have been painted with traditional Islamic iconography in geometric shapes. When I visit inside, I can feel the cries of women across time.

Soheila Sokhanvari: Rebel Rebel – Barbican Shop
Rebel Rebel – Agnes Ashe
ArtThursdays - Rebel-Rebel by Soheila Sokhanvari at The Curve, Barbic –  Stööki

Gender and Jewellery

I started to rethink the possibility of using jewellery design to improve the image of women to help them reduce the impact of self-objectification under the male gaze. With that thought, I began to explore the relationship between jewellery, patriarchy and femininity.

As Russell (2010) said: 

The hallmark of human civilization and patriarchy is hedged struggle for domination especially on the body of women, sexuality and production which is universal internationally. Jewellery, a form of art defines lucidly body interaction and is closely wound up to the social mechanism competing to dominate those very bodies.

Wearing a round metal ring on the finger and many other parts of the body is one of the common traditions in different parts of the world. The ring is one of the most symbolic of all types of jewellery. My choice of the ring as the main target for analysing the relationship between jewellery, patriarchy and femininity is representative and clear.

 Padaung women neck rings. 2013. 

1. The Tradition

The tradition of wearing rings or band as ornamental or ritual jewellery was derived from the Romans traditions and they had various symbolic functions like marriage, conspicuous exhibition of high status and wealth, family or kingdom seal, proprietary act, and fraternity or solitaire. It is explicit that design of rings for both male and female is different due to factors like body character, ritual or custom and psychological traits of the two aspects. On average, women are slightly shorter and fairer in complexion than men so the ring design for ladies is more exquisite and smaller. In contrast, men’s rings are wider and exaggerated appearances. Psychologically, ring is also used as love symbol, proprietary act, sexuality ownership, power wealth and status. Majority of rings which are presented to women for marriage proposals, faithfulness, poesy, purity, or betrothal all symbolizes an act of proprietary or ownership.

Indian bride bangles. 2014.

2. Wedding and Engagement Ring

Russell expressed a point that jewellery also as the symbol of control bodies and ownership of sexuality and for it the most obvious usage of jewellery is wedding ring and engagement ring. Various cultures traditionally had jewellery that separated the fertile and available from the rest of the women. Currently the size of the diamond or other precious stone on the ring of engagement dictates the worth of the woman. Also the larger the precious stone on the ring also denotes the woman beauty and prominence in the society. In early days the pain and faithfulness of the woman also translated to the size of the ring that the husband gives her. The rings varied from promise rings to faithful rings during the battle or during industrialization where men would venture out of their territories to look for better opportunities for their families as posited by Russell (2010). This means that the largest and burdensome ornaments were reserved for women whom the society viewed had honour and appropriate femininity mould. 

Ritual rings and other types of jewellery have been used as a tool of ownership of sexuality. This is grasped through physical incapacitation, ownership and control and is applied over to the female body. Engagement and wedding rings are examples of how jewellery exerts power to women over reproduction and sexuality. Betrothal rings were pieces of jewellery that restricted the girl from physically using their sexual organ for their own gratification but reserved it to the husband that the society deem fit.

Roman Engagement and Wedding Rings

3. The Diamond Ring

Diamond ring is the mainstream as engagement ring nowadays. The branding of the female body has been successfully and extremely incorporated through the male honour projection that is currently the American culture wrapped in the diamond engagement ring. The ritual is not tradition but a ploy devised by diamond producers and advertisers by integrating it into American ways of life. The trend commenced in 1880s and suffered a blow during the Word War 1 and due to Depression era (Miller, 1997). However, the trend was revived by the world biggest diamond cartel known as N.W Ayers for De Beers through advertisement campaigns that made diamond rings an inseparable part of engagement and wedding ritual. According to Cele and Scott (1996) De Beers campaign success was hedged on the narrative that sexual and wealth potency are associated with particular way in which their policy on engagement rings that are incorporated straight from the advert to the wedding etiquette gospel. Thus the campaign success also is hinged on making diamond ring an object of eliciting sex a link which has been conveyed to non-engagement advert for diamonds that created a proscriptive narrative on how to accurately procure an engagement ring coupled with the inflexible guide on how to determine the good quality and price. 

With the development, the company commenced an aggressive campaign using the slogans dubbed diamond are forever and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe lyrics of the song titled “Diamonds are a girl best friend.” The idea was to link diamond to sexuality and it materialized quickly which depicted a female willingness to be owned through diamonds exchange as gifts. What followed were adverts that portrayed explicitly sex and greed appeal and this was fuelled by the loosening of the nation moral during the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Natural Diamond Engagement Ring. 2018.

4. Feminist Jewellery

There is a small number of jewellers that have focussed their attention on gender issues and the gaze to which females are constantly subjected. These jewellers seem to speak to the feminist and queer approval of female choice and female agency, empowered female bodies, rather than the objectification of female bodies. Rebecca Russell investigates jewellers that produce works inspired by queer and feminist theory as well as experimenting with this idea in her own designs and manufacturing of jewellery. She describes her own work as a “creation of a body of work that explores jewellery’s potential to serve as a tool with which to critique and queer traditional thinking about the body.” (2009: 93)

The exploration of gender fluid jewellery

5. Conclusion 

All over the world from ancient’s times the rings have long been observed as the superlative symbol of faithfulness, fertility, poesy, betrothal, engagement or promise for marriage. At dissimilar time frame diverse rings ritual developed which continued to own women through proprietary act. Women have been subjected into situations and circumstances that are unacceptable and demeaning in exchange of a ring. Every stage of ancient woman life was crowned by a ring and finally marriage ring which crowned or marked as a symbol of ownership to eternity for women. Gender equality sources for free will and the engagement concerning the rings that are associated with the life of women harbours no free will but exhibit forced power dynamics (Russell, 2010). Men have asserted authority to women through societal hierarchical structures that demean women as inferior beings. From ancient time up to 21st century women continue to suffer injustices through being awarded a little precious token (diamond ring) while forfeiting their dignity and transformed forever into pallid misfortune symbol. Women sexuality ownership was asserted through the context of rings functions. The wedding and engagement rings traditionally served as both symbol and means of authority to enforce the expected role of wives. Gendered sexuality commenced once the girl reached puberty and the society engaged in mechanism which constructed gender bias through cycle of obligations and prohibitions. Physical incapacitation does not only serve to promote but also to impose ownership which neutralizes femininity by imposition of restrictions. The Paduang women were restricted through bronze neck rings, the Hindu bride through bangles and Turks bride through puzzle rings. In Africa women also underwent heinous physical incapacitation by wearing enormous jingle anklets and 5 kgs neck rings as imposed disability locuses. The incapacitating objects were usually crafted as cultural pride thus women are required to submit to these traditions that keep them subordinate. The exchange that happens during marriage or engagement using all manner of rings from diamond to gold commences the first subordination for women turning them into commodity, and further transcend to sexual labour division and other form of gender inequality.

The long-standing patriarchal system in which a man seems to have made a conscious decision to show his ‘purchasing power by using his wife’s body as a site for displaying his financial wealth’ has led to women’s bodies being ‘turned into a kind of capital bosom from which to hang jewellery’ (Arnold, 2013: 15). Media advertising under consumerism exacerbates this more entrenched ideology, such as the size of the diamond in an engagement ring often being a reflection of the husband’s financial power and possession of his wife. The female body is thus used as a display of power, adorned for others (especially men) to see. Feminism, on the other hand, advocates the rights and role of women in society and supports the freedom of choice for women to be able to make decisions on their own personal terms. Although some jewellery designers are aware of this issue and give feminist ideology to their designs, the focus remains on appearance, sexuality and the body, rather than on women’s individuality, talents and abilities.

Reference

1.Arnold, J. 2013. Victorian Jewellery, Identity, and the Novel: Prisms of Culture. London: Ashgate Publishing, pp.15. Available at: https://www.wfanet.org/app/uploads/2018/06/WFA-Guide-toProgressive-Gender-Portrayals-in-Advertising.pdf 

2.Awefeso, N. (2002). Wedding Rings and the Feminist Movement. Journal of Mundane Behaviour. 3(2).

3.Cele, O. & Scott, L. (1996). Something old, Something New: Exploring the Interaction between Ritual and Advertising. Journal of Advertising. 25(1): 33-50.

4.Kunz, G. (1917). Rings for the finger: from the earliest known times, to the present, with full descriptions of the origin, early making, materials, the archaeology, history, for affection, for love, for engagement, for wedding, commemorative, mourning, etc. London: J. B. Lippincott Company

5.Lerner, G. (1987). The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford UAP.

6.Miller, P. (1997). Those Quirky Dream Merchants. Catalog Age. 14(1):7.

7.Munn, G. (1993). The Triumph of Love: Jewellery 1530-1930. London: Thames & Hudson.

8.Russell, R. (2010). Gender and jewellery: a feminist analysis. Create-Space Independent Publishing Platform.

9.Scarisbrick, D. (2007). Rings Jewellery of Power, Love and Loyalty. London: Thames and Hudson Publishers.

10.Stol, M. (2016). Women in the Ancient Near East. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

11.Howard, V. (2003). A Real Man’s Ring: Gender and the Invention of Tradition. Journal of Social History. 36(4): 837-847.

12.Zoellner, T. (2006). Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire. New York: St Martin’s Press.

13.Kothari, K. (2017). The True Significance Of Bangles In Indian Culture. Accessed January 1, 2020 from: https://www.bollywoodshaadis.com/articles/the-true-significance-of-bangles-in-indian-culture-1665

14.Deneson, A. (2017). True love waits? The story of my purity ring and feeling like I didn’t have a choice. Accessed January 1, 2020 from The Guardian Online: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/feb/18/purity-ring-virginity-abstinence-sexual-education.

Analysis of the Questionnaire

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.

Survey Design

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:

  1. What is your age? 
  2. What is your gender?
  3. What is your sexual orientation? 
  4. Do you have a sense of the presence of the male gaze in the social media?
  5. Are you satisfied with the image you have now?
  6. 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?
  7. 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.)  
  8. 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?
  9. 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?
  10. What areas would you like to see improved to help women escape the effects of the male gaze?

The link of the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/CLWMH52

Boundaries of the Body

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.

在 East 2nd St. 和 Second Ave. 在 East Village 的 Acne Studios 的污损光屁股广告。
Acne Studio handbag ads

Reference:

  1. The human body in art, Rebecca Wall, Art And Culture
  2. The body in art
  3. Keith Boadwee
  4. What Is the Role of the Male Nude in the Art of Today?, Gavin Lenaghan, Art And Culture, Artwork
  5. Bad ass-vertising: Not all New Yorkers are behind these Acne Studios handbag ads
  6. Physical Attractiveness, Personality, and Social Reactions to Peer Pressure, Gerald R. Adams
  7. ‘Body Art’ and Social Status: Cutting, Tattooing and Piercing from a Feminist Perspective, Sheila Jeffreys
  8. 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.

Research and Reflections on Related Campaigns and Artworks

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). 

数字

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.

Figure

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, Unmasked: From Perverse to Profound - The New York Times

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

Artist and Technical Research

In the plan for the intervention I envisaged the possibility of producing the final jewellery in reality to help women in terms of craftsmanship or materials, for example by providing jobs or supporting traditional handicraft women makers.I found some relevant artists and studied their concepts and techniques in depth.

1) Heng Lee, a young talented Taiwanese jeweller and in her works the enamel is replaced by embroidery. Heng’s work is a mixture between computer assisted digital patterns and traditional crafts skills. In the “Floral Embroidery Series” he takes inspiration from the Chinese embroidery, which is a very old fine traditional craft. When you see his work you obviously thinking of pixels. It’s actually what he does: playing with photoshop in order to create a pixel mosaic. Then the shapes are cutting with a laser cutter. After using softwares, computer engineering and new technologies, Heng goes back to the traditional skills by using hand-embroidery to give colour and details to his pieces.

2) Zoe Lulu/ Xiangling Lu

Rice is very important in Asian culture and China is the world’s largest producer and seller of rice. In Lu Xiangling’s work, one can see how precious metals have been replaced by rice, to which she has added resin in order to make the rice stronger. Her work makes us ask ourselves about food consumption and waste and materialistic society. It’s not just about making beautiful jewellery out of unusual materials!

3) Ziju Chen

In 2006, American jeweller Ziju Chen researched and experienced a lost technique following her Master of Fine Arts degree. The jeweller is an artist in residence at Xiamen University in Fujian Province, China, and a lecturer at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China.
In the series ‘China, Silhouettes of Memory’, Ziju Chen uses the famous bright blue feathers alongside Chinese banknotes, coral, turquoise and old photographs of Chinese families. Layers of banknotes with thin lines drawn by the feathers. Colour and technique are used to link and set the different parts and materials together. ziju Chen melts monofilament (used in fishing) to tie beads etc. Every detail tells us a story about China, its traditions and beliefs.

Male gaze and Female gaze

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.