Patriarchal Gaze Research Articles

The patriarchal Western gaze and the discursive policing of fandom: “Koreaboo” as stigma

The derogatory label “Koreaboo,” used to stigmatize Korean popular culture fans, suggests Korean media's movements are treated as a contaminant rather than a welcome presence. In this research project, I conducted focus group research and analyses of Reddit threads to understand the ways women fans of color in this study interpret and navigate taste hierarchies that mock women's interests in celebrities and texts from a racialized Asian nation. Korean popular culture fans of color reject “Koreaboo” for themselves, but they project the label onto “bad” White fans, who are perceived as having inappropriate fannish interests that deviate from popularly held standards of intercultural and interracial fan interest. The self-disciplining within fandom distances itself from the Western patriarchal gaze by re-directing its focus. Even when fans of color seek Korean media to escape White hegemony and heteronormative patriarchy, they internalize and react to its gaze in their fan practice.

Exodus and Return: A study of spaces in The Summer Before the Dark

British writer Doris Lessing (1919-2013) is praised as an epicist of the female experience. In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Summer Before the Dark, published in 1973, is one of Lessing’s best-selling books. It has been mostly studied from the perspectives of feminism, psychoanalysis, and narratology. This paper adopts an innovative perspective of space theory to analyze the work. Kate, the heroine of the novel, has long suffered from the patriarchal gaze. Kate resorts to a variety of spatial means to escape her original suffering. She tries to get rid of spiritual slavery through her exodus. In the journey, she discovers that only by establishing a firm self can she truly emerge from her spiritual dilemma. Lessing’s pioneering exposition of women’s experience continues in this novel. She points out that the private feelings of women are difficult to find expression in the male-dominated world. The story finally leads to the woman’s psychological liberation and reunion with her family.

A Critical Analysis of Working Mothers Work-family Dilemma in Modern European Society: Using the 2021 French Film " Plein Temps" as a Window

As mothers labor force participation rate increases dramatically over the past few decades, so is the discussion of their work-family dilemma. It has brought to our attention that the media tend to oversimplify this dilemma and individualize it as an individual problem of women. Using the French film Plein Temps (Full Time) as an entry point, this study analyzes the work-family dilemma faced by working mothers in modern European society from the perspectives of structural discrimination and restrictive gender stereotypes, dissects discrimination in the workplace context and the patriarchal gaze behind these phenomena, and concludes with more open-ended and practical initiatives. Combining the empirical and theological analysis, this study is able to explore the root causes of the widespread problem of work-family dilemma. Our findings support the existence of workplace discrimination and pre-determined negative gender stereotypes against working mothers. We argue that mothers work-family dilemma reflects the structural sexism in todays society.

Temporal Surfacing: Mosori Monika (1970) and Chick Strand's Cross-Cultural Explorations

Abstract This article considers how the temporality at work in Chick Strand's film Mosori Monika (US, 1970) breaks with the patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist narratives of genealogy, progress, and production. In Mosori Monika, an experimental ethnographic film that documents the swamps of Orinoco River in Venezuela, filmmaker Strand focuses her attention on the interactions between the Spanish Franciscan missionaries who came to the site in 1945 and the Warao who had little to no interaction with the outside world before the missionaries’ appearance. The film shows the competing realities and subjectivities of two women living in the area: a Franciscan nun, Sister Isabel, and an old Warao woman, Carmelita. Unlike the linear “exceptional artist beyond her time” narratives manifest in the recent spur of interest in Strand's body of work, the article explores the contemporary feel of Strand's film in relation to the transnational, cross-cultural, and affective ranges that go unnoticed when the scope of 1970s feminisms is painted in broad brushstrokes. Accordingly, the article emphasizes that Strand's nonteleological approach to history and ethnography in her film at once challenges the colonial, patriarchal gaze and its temporal distanciation and subjugation and invites us to reassess the linear feminist narratives of evolution, progress, and/or loss that often tend to rely on reductive historical periodization. Strand's filmmaking methods and style provide us with an alternative feminist historiographical model, “surfacing,” that highlights the productive resonances between then, now, and possible futures.

Reclaiming the Maternal Metis Body

This article provides a contemporary feminist autoethnographical account of my lived experiences of reclaiming my pregnant, birthing, and maternal bodies through intimate abuse and coercive control and beyond. Drawing from contemporary and culturally diverse feminist perspectives, I unpack the over-medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth and how it operates on a continuum of the systematic, institutional, cultural, and patriarchal gaze, surveillance, and control of women’s bodies. The paper will unpack the Battered Woman’s Syndrome as a problematic example of this clinical and medical patriarchal gaze and control and its prevalence in contemporary medical, psychological, and legal discourses relating to women living with intimate abuse and coercive control, and their bodies. I draw from my own personal experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering through intimate abuse and coercive control, the practice of zuò yuè zi, and the mythology of the Goddess Metis as sites of resistance, resilience, and resourcefulness that challenge the Western patriarchal gaze, surveillance, and control over women’s bodies. The paper will offer three alternative and counternarratives and ways of rethinking, reframing, and reimagining the pregnant, birthing, and maternal body as sites of resistance and resourcefulness through the ancient Greek mythology of Metis, the ancient Chinese practices of zuò yuè zi, and homebirth.

An educational opportunity for (re)-scripting gender justice as an imperative of faith and citizenship: a South African case

ABSTRACT The centring of Muslim women in Islam resides in an intertwining historico-politico -theological narrative of gender reform, first promulgated in a seventh century revelation of the Qur’an. Significantly, the gains derived by the women of Islam’s first community, have become lost in the dominance of contemporary androcentric-patriarchal interpretations. The argument advanced by this paper is that Muslim educational institutions have a responsibility in (re)-scripting gender justice as an imperative of the scripture; and in establishing resonance between identities of faith and citizenship. I commence by looking at the disjuncture between what Islam says about gender equality, and how it unfolds under the predominant auspices of a patriarchal gaze. As an example of this disconnection, I focus on the trajectory of the ‘women in mosques’ campaigns in South Africa, spanning from an apartheid to a democratic context – noting that despite, or perhaps, because of far-reaching political change, the resistance encountered by Muslim women has remained the same. Thereafter, I turn my attention to an intertwining consideration: the responsibility of Muslim education in (re)-scripting gender justice as an imperative of the scripture; and the obligation of Muslim education in establishing resonance between identities of faith and citizenship.

“Heavens What Are They Up To!”

Abstract In Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, the protagonist Winnie recalls being gawked at by an offensive passerby. Despite the pain she endures from this crude fellow whose looking represents the patriarchal gaze, the aging Winnie seeks attention from her husband and the audience. In her need for attention, that is to-be-looked-at, Winnie reveals that she is not meek. She fondly recollects men from her past and with pleasure looks at a pornographic postcard she takes from her partner, Willie. Beckett’s play complicates the patriarchal gaze with its exploration of the female gaze—a gaze that reveals Winnie’s desire for sexual intimacy.

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

Feminist Critiques and the Modification and Persistence of Popular Androcentric Images of Early Hominin Biosocial Evolution

A feminist critical gaze in analyses of images in popular media found that a patriarchal gaze in androcentric visual reconstructions of early biosocial hominin evolution persists despite some recent modifications in response to feminist critiques. Academic patriarchal reconstructions of hominin evolution and feminist critiques and research disproving them must first be outlined in order to be able to conduct feminist critical analyses of images in popular media that are influenced by academic research. Images of hominin evolution in popular media are important to examine not only because they shape public conceptions, but because they also influence archaeological reconstructions of hominin evolution.

La dirección escénica femenina

En el campo del teatro de títeres en Argentina, la presencia femenina era y es muy importante. Todo este enorme trabajo de las mujeres en el arte de los títeres no estuvo exento, como nada lo está, de la mirada patriarcal sobre las y los iniciadores de nuestro lenguaje. Este artículo reflexiona sobre la legitimación, reconocimiento y diversidad estética de la obra hecha por mujeres y se pregunta si existe una dirección que podamos llamar femenina en el campo del teatro de títeres y objetos.

Transcending Borders in the Work of Fumie Taniguchi

Fumie Taniguchi was a nihonga painter whose modern portraits of women enjoyed widespread acclaim within art circles during the 1930s. Although she moved to America shortly after Japan lost the war and spent the latter half of her life there, her existence was suddenly forgotten. There are almost no extant examples of Taniguchi’s paintings from her American period, however, her autobiographical novels that appeared in Japanese American fanzines provide significant clues that help to trace her life. Through these publications and oral interviews with her family members, this article seeks to introduce readers to the painterly practice and life of Taniguchi, and make clear what exactly was distinctive and unique about her life and practice. For a woman who continued to struggle against the patriarchal gaze both in Japan and the Japanese American community, what did the notion of transcending borders mean?

The Nude That Looks Back: Self-Images by Violeta Bubelytė

Violeta Bubelytė (b.1956) has been making nude self-portraits in Lithuania continuously for three decades, commencing in 1981. Despite her efforts to avoid verbalizing the visual works that she creates, her images appear to display an analytical approach to art history. One can also relate them to social changes in gender representation and values which the artist has witnessed and, in a way, predicted. Bubelytė’s self-images make an immediate impact – by evoking mechanisms of visual memory invaded by oddness, which comes from the gaze that she returns to the viewer. Her pictures contain elements of spiritual quest and of understanding her identity – which have been widely noticed by critics. I see her also as a rebel and as someone who deconstructs visual culture by, in a literal sense, facing the patriarchal gaze – and I argue that, by doing this, she also changes the very dynamics of looking. The artist came ‘out of nowhere’ – she did not fit into the official tradition of Lithuanian photography nor into the new wave of photography which denied that tradition. Full recognition of her input to the field of photography has come slowly and with difficulty.

John Keats'in Lamia Şiiri ve Yaşar Kemal'in Yılanı Öldürseler Romanında Eril Kol

Bakış sadece bakma eylemini değil erkek egemen toplumsal söylemin kadınları kontrol etmesini ve onları belli bir şekilde temsil etmesini simgeler. Kültür tarihinde, mitolojide ve edebiyatta kadın sıkça yılanla (örn. Medusa, Lamia, Lilith) özdeşleştirilmiştir ve kötülük, cazibe ve büyü kaynağı olarak görülmüştür. Mitolojide ve kültür tarihinde yılansı kadının yaptığı kötülükler kem göz ile anlatılır ve koruyucu mavi göz (Türkçe’de nazarlık) veya bakış eril dünyayı bu kötülüklerden korumak için kullanılır. İngiliz Romantik şairi John Keats’in mitolojide üst tarafı kadın alt tarafı yılan olan Lamia’nın haberci tanrı Hermes tarafından insana dönüştürüldükten sonra Lycius adındaki genç bir adamla yaşadığı aşkı anlatan Lamia adlı şiiri, Corinth’in eril dünyasında Lamia’nın yokedilmesi konusunda kolektif bakışın işlevini yansıtmaktadır. Şiirde, bilge Apollonius’un öğrencisi Lycius’u yılanın kötülüklerinden koruma işlevi gören ‘mavi bakışı’ bu çalışmanın amacı bağlamında önemlidir. Yaşar Kemal’in Yılanı Öldürseler romanında eril/toplumsal bakış bu sefer kocası eski sevgilisi tarafından öldürülen ve çok güzel bir kadın olan Esme’ye odaklanmıştır. Roman başlığının gösterdiği gibi eril bakışın amacı yılanı ezmektir ve birçok karakter, özellikle de Esme’nin kaynanası, Hasan’ı annesini öldürmeğe ikna etmek için bir köy ortamındaki eril toplumsal söylemin bütün araçlarını kullanır. Makale, bakışın tarihi, dini ve mitolojik önemini, eril yönünü ve dişil olanla bağı veya mitik/tarihi çatışmasını ele almayı amaçlamaktadır. Makale, bu konuları Keats’in Lamia şiiri ve Yaşar Kemal’in Yılanı Öldürseler romanı bağlamında ele almaktadır.

Tras las lentes de Isabel Coixet: cine, compromiso y feminismo by Barbara Zecchi

 Reviews Tras las lentes de Isabel Coixet: cine, compromiso y feminismo. Ed. by B Z. Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza. .  pp. €. ISBN ––––. ‘I don’t know if I have themes, what I do have are certain obsessions that, although I try to repress them, always come out’ (p. ). ese words, uttered by Isabel Coixet in the interview with María Donapetry that constitutes the last chapter of this edited volume, encapsulate the key insights of the most exhaustive work on the film-maker to date. Tras las lentes de Isabel Coixet purports to delve into both the themes and the obsessions that Coixet herself acknowledges, employing auteur and feminist theory alike as epistemological framework. A publication of this kind inevitably faces the difficulty of saying something new about a director who has been written about extensively. Barbara Zecchi’s track record of publishing on cinema and feminism ensures that she is ideally placed to take on this challenge, co-ordinating a volume that offers an overview of Coixet’s output over a quarter of a century. A holistic perspective is the book’s first unique selling point, bringing her more canonical fiction films—from Demasiado viejo para morir joven () to Learning to Drive ()—into dialogue with documentary works—with a special emphasis on Cartas a Nora (Invisibles, ), La mujer, cosa de hombres (), and Escuchando al juez Garzón ()—alongside a general profile of the director as well as the aforementioned interview. e contributors , both individually and collectively, also develop innovative methodological approaches, informed by feminist theory and focusing on the haptic elements of Coixet’s cinema. is publication is the product of twenty-two authors from different geographical and disciplinary backgrounds. Although it is almost inevitably difficult to maintain quality control in an endeavour of this kind, the combination of rigorous scholarship and more informal pieces will broaden the appeal. In spite of their heterogeneous nature, the writers concur on Coixet’s principal authorial traits being cosmopolitanism and social commitment. ese concerns are addressed thematically—the benefits of non-places or postnational locations for raising social awareness about specific issues (ranging from femicide to war crimes)—and in relation to visual style. e ‘practices of embodied vision’ (p. ) are highlighted through devices that include but are not limited to the use of handheld cameras, grainy images, close-up shots, the manipulation of real time, and a desynchronized audio track. ese ‘practices of embodied vision’ provide the justification for Zecchi’s overarching rationale of analysing Coixet from the perspective of feminist film theory, drawing primarily on the work of Laura Mulvey (scopophilia), Laura U. Marks (tactile visuality), and Kaja Silverman (acoustic mirror theory) to challenge and counteract cinema’s hegemonic patriarchal gaze. More specifically, the film-maker and contributors to this volume are similarly committed to refuting the idea of women as the passive object of the gaze as well as bringing differing haptic strategies into play. Coixet’s feminist appeal to all the senses encourages an active position for the spectator: ‘we are not passive voyeurs, but active synaesthetes’ (p. ). As a MLR, .,   result, this volume functions as a good first port of call not just for those interested in discovering more about Coixet’s cinema, but also for students keen to become more literate in film analysis and feminist theory. U C III  M T M J e Cinema of Lucrecia Martel. By D M. Manchester: Manchester University Press. .  pp. £. ISBN ––––. Since , when her debut film was released, Lucrecia Martel has been the subject of multiple scholarly articles, film reviews, and interviews in several languages. She is the most innovative and successful contemporary Argentinean film-maker, and her work has national and international recognition. is book by Deborah Martin explains and analyses the nature of Martel’s success. Written in English and intended for an academic audience, e Cinema of Lucrecia Martel consists of four chapters devoted to close filmic analysis alongside an Introduction and a Conclusion. Opening with a detailed contextualization of Martel ’s place within ‘New Argentine Cinema’, Martin sets her subject apart from her contemporaries as the one able to lead the charge, taking experimental...

Bertha’s Intuitive Quest:

This article puts light on the unmasking of Bertha’s unawake self in Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Bliss” published in 1918. Mansfield unlocks the shackled and entangled experiences of sexuality and femininity in the narration of the story. The phases of development of Bertha’s conscience are metaphorically parallel to the way the story unfolds. The setting of the story too plays a dominant role in the projection of her cocooned self. The unrecognized personality in Bertha is reflected when she comes across Miss Fulton, her acquaintance as a foil in the form of a mask prepared beneath. The contradictions and dilemmas in her mind are concretized when she confronts the typical feminine essence in Fulton which later she finds to have attracted her husband, Harry. Furthermore, several instances in the story establish the gradual realization of Bertha. Her quest for a self is her inward struggle to set herself free from the stereotypical constraints of the society she lives in. Mansfield breaks the paradigm of seeing women through the patriarchal gaze. Hence, Bertha remains the insipient sojourner who never knowingly dares to rebel or submit to the worldly customs.

Forget Bárbara Virgínia? A forerunner filmmaker between Portugal and Brazil

Bárbara Virgínia was a forerunner film director in Portugal and the Festival de Cannes. Starting artistically as a diseuse and actress, she directed a feature film and a documentary in her youth, in 1946. Bárbara emigrated to Brazil in 1952 to work on radio and television, the country where she settled, formed a family, eventually abandoning the stages, and died in 2015. For this socio-biography, we collected and analysed public and private memory documents, a research interview and conversations with her family. To construct our analysis and strengthen a feminist perspective, we used Portuguese cinema’s History and memoirs. We both avoided mythologising and aimed at unveiling the patriarchal gaze which shapes some literature about Bárbara Virgínia. We built our questioning and analysis from Linda Alcoff’s and Teresa de Lauretis’s gender studies, from the sociology of culture by Pierre Bourdieu who Bev Skeggs borrowed for her intersection of class, gender and coloniality, alongside historical and social research about both countries’ context. The paper focuses on the artistic and familiar roles played by the filmmaker, and proposes an interpretation aimed to contribute to a fine knowledge about gender and class barriers to cultural and professional practices at that time, while it also discusses the erasure of memory about Barbara Virginia.

Debatiendo la existencia de un mirada lésbica en La Vida de Adèle (2013) = Against the Lesbian Gaze in Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)

Ever since the publication of Laura Mulvey´s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) very few concepts have been as widely contested by feminist scholars as the idea of the patriarchal gaze. Mulvey’s thesis was that women on screen are the object of the male gaze, an idea supported by traditional psychoanalytic binarisms that associate man with subjective, active desire and woman with passive lack, negating the possibility of female desire – and spectatorship – as such. According to both Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane (1982), the “over-proximity” of the woman to her own image negates the distance required for the voyeuristic and fetishist pleasures found in cinema. However, this account of the scopophilic gaze does not consider the position of the quintessential desiring female subject: the lesbian, that “privileged site of enquiry” for feminist film theory that is both subject and object of desire. It was not until 1991 that Teresa de Lauretis started to locate the coordinates for this desiring (lesbian) subject within film studies beyond the traditional opposition object/subject. In her essay “Film and the Visible,” based on Sheila McLaughlin´s She Must Be Seeing Things (1987), she draws on Jean Laplanche and Bertrand Pontalis´ notion of fantasy as a setting of desire in order to describe how the lesbian spectator might find pleasure adopting any of the roles available in the cinematic fantasy, “looking on, outside the fantasy scenario and nonetheless involved.” (1991, p.96) With these ideas in mind, I will argue whether Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) constitutes a mise-en-scène of lesbian fantasy, or whether it imposes a privileged voyeurism in consonance with Mulvey´s account of the dominant male gaze, becoming a text contaminated by the director´s own fantasies of lesbian sex, a “commercial”, aestheticized portrait of lesbianism fitting into what Monique Wittig called “the straight mind” (1992).

Representation of women in visual representation system of fashion photography structuralized by male gaze

This study is a theoretical research to investigate a methodological framework for analyzing the representation of women in fashion photography. For this study, this article attempts to develop a conceptual framework of the visual representation system through Lacan’s gaze theory, and analyze the representational aspects of women configured by gendered characteristics in the visual representation system. Structuralizing the visual representation system based on that theory, the gaze, the image/screen, and the subject of representation in the Lacan’s triangle diagram are replaced by the camera as the signifier of gaze, the representational image, and the seeing subject respectively. In the visual representation system, the camera creates a male-oriented visual field and structures a relationship of gendered power between male gaze as the seeing subject and female eye as an object to be seen. Looking into the representational aspects of women in this visual representation system structuralized by male gaze, women are represented in a way that reflects male desire through masquerade to comply with the patriarchal gaze, or differences that emphasizes the uniqueness and autonomy of women released from a patriarchal discourse. This study would be significant in that it provides theoretical basis for an analytic approach to the representation of women in fashion photography which we accept as a fixed one through the ideology of naturalization.

Pedro Almodóvar's La piel que habito: Of Late Style and Erotic Conservatism

In this article, I read Almodóvar's film La piel que habito (2011) as an example of what Edward Said calls late style. However, unlike the perfecting or visionary style of artists' later works, Almodóvar's late style, lacking the counter-cultural ground provided by La movida, the urban movement in post-Francoist Spain, becomes self-referential, not only in the repeated allusions to his earlier films, but also in his readiness to imitate Hollywood's canonical cinematic language. In fact, I argue that La piel que habito maintains an internal dialogue with Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The avant-garde aura identified with Almodóvar's cinema is often related to La Movida. Yet, as Eduardo Subirats contends in Modernidad y exilio, this cultural movement never attempted to revise the political, social and cultural content remaining from the fascist rule but rather recycled them into a form of cultural transvestism. I argue that, beyond its liberated disguise, Almodóvar's conception of sexuality is ideologically conservative, hinging on an understanding of gender relations that corroborate the tenets of Laura Mulvey's classic critique of the patriarchal gaze in Hollywood narrative cinema. The conservatism unearthed in this article refers to patriarchal conceptions of courtly love developed by Jacques Lacan in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Particularly, I look at the construction of the feminine that results from Almodóvar's erotic conservatism.