Reclaiming The Gaze
By: Naomi Piedra
In this pictures I am challenging the male gaze by facing away from them in rebellion and staring right at them with dominance and elegance.
Ways Of Seeing
John Berger -2 quotes
“Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.”
Reaction- When I read this quote I immediately thought of gender equality and why women are constantly fighting for it. Men tend tend to think that they can treat a woman depending on how she looks. In reality no matter how a woman presents herself or chooses to dress, she shall be treated with the upmost respect. Just as much as men want to be respected.
“(Here and in the European tradition generally, the convention of not painting the hair on a woman's body helps towards the same end. Hair is associated with sexual power, with passion. The woman's sexual passion needs to be minimized so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly of such passion.) Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.”
Reaction- Although this reading was talking about a long time ago, it is still relevant to this day. Women have ben fighting for their equal rights and that includes normalizing body hair on women as much as on men. I believe body hair to this day makes men feel inferior and with less control over women because although they show how disgusted thy are by it, women do it anyways taking back the power that was taken from them long ago.
Understanding Patriarchy
Bell Hooks -2 quotes
“Of these systems the one that we all learn the most about growing up is the system of patriarchy, even if we never know the word, because patriarchal gender roles are assigned to us as children and we are given continual guidance about the ways we can best fulfill these roles.”
Reaction- Patriarchy is another thing that was created to make women feel less than men. Patriarchy gender roles have been past down through generations and it is now just starting to change as more and more women speak up and act how they want.
“Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists\that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.”
Reaction- Patriarchy is not something often spoken about because the less talked about the less women are aware of it and the less they will try to change. Luckily for us in this day and age women have become aware of the patriarchy and often bring awareness to it and speak on it in hopes of change. Of course some men are against that change because they still want to feel superior patriarchy doesn’t only affect women it affects men too because not every man wants to be tough all the time, sometimes it is good to be soft and vulnerable and in the eyes of the patriarchy it is considered wrong for them.
The Oppositional Gaze
Bell Hooks - 2 quotes
“By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality." Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one's gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency.”
Reaction- A person can say a lot just by a gaze, the way you look at someone or something shows how you perceive them. A gaze can show wether you respect or dislike someone.
“Looking at films with an oppositional gaze, black women were able to critically assess the cinema's construction of white womanhood as object of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the victim or the perpetrator. Black female spectators, who refused to identify with white womanhood, who would not take on the phallocentric gaze of desire and possession, created a critical space where The binary opposition Mulvey posits of “woman as image, man as bearer of the look” was continually deconstructed.“
Reaction- Black females made a statement by looking at films with an oppositional gaze and not identifying with the white womanhood. By creating the critical space where the binary opposition Mulvey posits of woman and men, where it was able to be deconstructed and forced for it to be reconstructed differently.
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