ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Over the last ten years or so many critical reflections on what has been called ‘the gaze’ have been published and we are not the only writers who have grappled with the complexity of the theory.1 Many debates about the gaze have been dogged by factionalism, theoretical impasse, and a kind of orthodoxy which this article hopes to review and challenge. It is our feeling that many writers have demanded too much of the gaze, and that it has almost become a cliché. Often when individuals use the term the ‘male gaze’ they mean nothing more complex than the way men look at women or, worse, they refer to the male gaze as a metaphor for ‘patriarchy’. For example, in Figure 1, the graffiti slogan ‘resist the male gaze’ is coupled with a playboy motif. We liked the graffiti but we felt the ideas underlying it were a troubling sign of something else. Such usage undermines complex argument and produces crass and essentialist models of social relationships. Primary texts about the gaze were originally much more sophisticated. But even they have proved inadequate as a tool for analysing the complex ways in which individuals look at, and identify with a range of contemporary images, beyond cinema, from art to ads, fashion mags to pop promos.
