The Male Gaze in Art and Raja Ravi Verma's Work

The “gaze” is a term that describes how viewers engage with visual media. Originating in film theory and criticism in the 1970s, the gaze refers to how we look at visual representations. These include advertisements, television programs, paintings and even cinema.

When film critics talk about the gaze, they are often referring to the “male gaze”. But what does that really mean?

The male gaze simply means that – the men staring at a female body. Gaze- to look intently, that is what the dictionary says but mostly the artists and other art mediums have used it to objectify women. 

In fact the word in art circles is that “making nudes” is the fastest way to “catch the attention of art curators”…but why?

History…                         

The film critic Laura Mulvey, a British film theorist and critic, coined this term in the late 1970’s in her essay entitled, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”.

It basically talks about how women are depicted in the visual world to represent sexual objects for the pleasure of a man’s viewing. The male gaze has 3 main perspectives world, (i) that of the man behind the camera looking at the nude body, (ii) the female looking   

At herself in a mirror (iii) that of the spectator gazing at the direct  image. 

How did this term actually come about ?

The term is now well know and hotly debated in art circles , but the term actually came from  the idea that women as positioned as objects to be viewed by the men for their pleasure !The “male gaze” invokes the way men  gaze at female nudity that actually empowers men  but objectifies women. 

In the concept of the “male gaze” a woman is nothing more than an object , so placed to give viewing pleasure to a man and make her the “object” of his heterosexual feelings , giving no credence to her own feelings, thoughts or  own sexual drive, which in the case of a “male gaze” are actually of no consequence. The entire concept of the male gaze is so called “framed by the man’s desire “to enjoy the optics of a woman’s anatomy!

Adopting the language of psychoanalysis, Mulvey argued that traditional cinema looked only to give “sexual pleasure “to men looking at it and soon it moved from cinema to Art .

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

Finding the male gaze

The male gaze takes many forms, but can be identified by situations where female characters are controlled by, and mostly exist in terms of what they represent to, the hero. As Budd Boetticher, who directed classic Westerns during the 1950s, put it:

What counts is what the painting/art provokes in the man as the viewer , in herself the woman has not the slightest importance.

In India Raja Ravi Varma and his work provided that voyeuristic pleasure to the male and most of his nude women paintings also reflect the centrality of the "male gaze" in defining the feminine image.

Although a century has passed yet his work on male gaze images , still provokes strong reactions from the art fraternity as to how insistently women are presented as sexual objects.

Objectifying women as sex objects is not only against human rights but also against gender justice. And male gaze does just that.

To know more, have a look at his work at https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/raja-ravi-varma/m03p0s9?hl=en  and do mail your comments on “male gaze”!