The Gaze

The idea of gaze that the writers talk about is interesting. This continues the discussion in the earlier two chapters regarding the social and communal constructions of reality through the interaction between the producer, recipient and the context. Visual culture appropriates reality (?) to fulfill the expectations of the idealized viewers. For instance, in most of the cinemas and other visual representations of women, they are (re)presented as objects of male desire. Similarly, in many of the movies, novels, or other books, the Arabs or the ‘Black’ (inclusive term, including all other than Anglo-Saxon Whites[?]) are often presented in the role of the villain. This bears witness to the fact that both the gaze of the producers and the consumers is conditioned by the ideology of the society. Another interesting nature of the gaze is that it is not often turned back by the object of gaze, rather it is turned inward. This is what Foucault calls by the normalization of the institutional gaze. However, we should not think of this process as uniform and one-way. There are several negotiations and conflicts in the realm of visual productions. The gaze can equally be appropriated.
The gaze, usually taken to be individual and neutral, is always, as the writers contend, social and ideological. This is often both conscious and unconscious, as the various theorists suggest. We have a long history of presenting women as nudes or objects of beauty in painting and photography, which corresponds to the dominance of patriarchal ideology in the long history of the West (same is true to many of the non-western societies). The subversion of the ideology in recent times has been accompanied by the production of visual culture dismantling the traditional notions about gender.
Similarly, the idea of the gaze extends, as Edward Said says, to the relationship between the west and the non-west. The way the western people look at or expect to see the non-western (or often third world) people and society is conditioned by the kinds of knowledge they have acquired from their culture (readings, movies, and television). For instance, the pictures in the book of some girls in the paddy field, the exotic picture of the women and men from Papua New Guinea reflects how the Westerners exoticize the non-Westerners. The interesting thing is whoever is the photographer, the pictures captured will have, in most cases, the similar nature. This is because they have always built a lens through which to see the world they actually visit. The same holds true to the case of the co modification of women.
However, such representations are also challenged. I remember one poem written by Sylvia Plath in which she challenges the male gaze by inviting the spectators to see her body in the public. In her performative act, she turns the gaze back to the males and assigns agency and the counter-gaze to the female speaker of the poem. I was reminded of this poem when I read the debate about pornography, which is really a complicated issue. Thus the meaning of a image is also the product of the gaze of the spectators.