Male gaze

The Body

Theories of the body are particularly important for feminists because the female body has historically been denigrated as weak, immoral, unclean, or decaying.

In her essay "Women's Time" in New Maladies of the Soul, originally published in 1979, Kristeva argues that there are three phases of feminism.

She rejects the first phase because it  "seeks universal equality and overlooks sexual differences. Kristeva also rejects what she sees as the second phase of feminism because it seeks a uniquely feminine language, which she thinks is impossible. Kristeva does not agree with feminists who maintain that language and culture are essentially patriarchal and must somehow be abandoned.

On the contrary, Kristeva insists that culture and language are the domain of speaking beings and women are primarily speaking beings. Kristeva endorses what she identifies as the third phase of feminism which seeks to reconceive of identity and difference and their relationship. This current phase of feminism refuses to choose identity over difference or visa versa

Kristeva proposes that there are as many sexualities as there are individuals.  Especially in the contemporary culture of a fluid gender identity this seems prescient.

It is generally accepted in  feminist theory that the male gaze presents women from a masculine and heterosexual point of view, representing women merely  as objects

of male pleasure

As the art historian John Berger said, women in painting don’t usually look out at the viewer: they aren’t considering the viewer, but considering how the viewer sees them. They have an inward gaze, rather than an outward gaze.  

Professor Andrew Lear MOMA

The term male gaze was coined in 1975 by the feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in her essay1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. , .^[The male gaze is comparable to scopophilia. Women are depicted in the passive role of the observed

^:Her feelings, thoughts and her own sexual drives are less important than her being “framed” by male desire

Visual media that respond to masculine voyeurism tends to sexualise women for a male viewer. As Mulvey wrote, women are characterised by their “to-be-looked-at-ness” in cinema. Woman is “spectacle”, and man is “the bearer of the look”.  

I have been exploring this concept by placing my roughly stitched and patched life size female figure in the poses of past paintings by famous artists thus taking the place of the idealised, romantic, available, woman depicted

I added a crocheted incubus to the Fuseli  intending that the use of "Female Crafts" would subvert the male gaze.

I

Those who have seen the pose have still found it disturbing, I assume this is partly because the patriarchal culture that persists still holds the power to remind women of their vulnerability even by a cuddly toy

The print of Fuseli's painting The Nightmare sold by the thousands in the eighteenth century

 

 

 

 

 

 The spreading wide my narrow Hands

What is a Body?

An Object.
"A machine containing our consciousness" 
Body Mind Dualism 

The Description of the Human Body 

1647  Rene Descartes

An Object receives meaning

A Subject produces meaning

     

I dwell in Possibility –

A fairer House than Prose –

More numerous of Windows –

Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –

Impregnable of eye –

And for an everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –

Bird nests that perhaps link Emily and Eva sensitivities

For Occupation – This –

The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise – " 


Emily Dickinson
















Is there no way out of the mind
Steps at my back spiral into the well
There are no trees or birds in this world
there is only sourness



Apprehensions
Sylvia Plath






Elizabeth Frink described Eva Hesse' work as


"a self imposed apprenticeship in lostness and groping"

     Eva Hesse   Not Yet 1966

  Elizabeth Frink  1986

Incubus



Michel Nedjar

Much has been written about Nedjar since Roger Cardinal's in-depth study published in Lausanne in 1990: of his childhood in a large Jewish family in an idyllic house with a garden in a northern suburb of Paris; of the brutal figure of his father, a Sephardi tailor reminiscent of Kafka's terrible genitor; of his Ashkenazi mother and his Polish, Yiddish-speaking grandmother, who introduced Nedjar to schmattes, the old rags which he later adopted as material for his handmade embryonic dolls.

And of his encounter with Téo Hernandez, a Mexican experimental film-maker who became his mentor in the arts; and of their subsequent travels to Morocco, India, Mexico and elsewhere, after which he felt an urgent 'need to work in magic' and hence began his artistic production around May 1976.

One event that dates back to Nedjar's youth is often mentioned also, and is supposed to have been the original trauma that later triggered his creative output: the evening when, at the age of thirteen, he stumbled upon Alain Resnais' movie Nuit et Brouillard on television and discovered the terrifying reality of the Nazi concentration camps. 'I had two aunts who returned from Auschwitz and they told us,' recalls Nedjar. 'But words don't have the power of the image. Resnais' movie really shook me. After the Shoah, that was it: I had left Eden.' And it is a fact that, many years later, Nedjar discovered with amazement that he handled his dolls in the same way that he had seen the soldiers in the film pile up the corpses in the pits when he was a teenager.

Raw Vision #63

Made to instruction by Rose Finn-Kelcey

Detail by Henry Fuseli

This painting has yielded many interpretations and is seen as prefiguring late nineteenth-century psychoanalytic theories regarding dreams and the unconscious (Sigmund Freud allegedly kept a reproduction of the painting on the wall of his apartment in Vienna).

The figure that sits upon the woman’s chest is often described as an imp or an incubus, a type of spirit said to lie atop people in their sleep or even to have sexual intercourse with sleeping women. Fuseli’s painting is suggestive but not explicit, leaving open the possibility that the woman is simply dreaming.

Dream Catcher

In this work I have made several little figures with enlarged  faces, painted in the horror mask tradition, the incubuses are held in side a net, a "Body Bag"  Other decapitated heads pile up at the bottom of the bag.