ABSTRACT
In this chapter I want to explore the specific nature of homosocial relations through the notions of the gaze and the glance. I will propose some reflections on intermale looking. The distinction between gaze and glance has been introduced by Norman Bryson (1983) in a discussion of modes of looking at painting. The gaze is for him the look that ahistoricizes and disembodies itself and objectifies, takes hold of, the contemplated object. The glance, in contrast, is the involved look when the viewer, aware of the bodily participating in the process of looking, interacts with the painting and does not need, therefore, to deny the work of representation. Mieke Bal, elaborating on Bryson's distinction, says the following about the glance: “The awareness of one's own engagement in the act of looking entails the awareness that what one sees is a representation, not an objective reality, not the 'real thing' (1991: 142). The gaze is a reading attitude that conflates model and figure in representation, an attitude that is encouraged by “transparent” realism, effacing the traces of the labor of representation. The glance, in contrast, is the mode that emphasizes the viewer's own position as viewer and the representational status of the object of looking.
&souvent les femmes ne nous plaisent qu'à cause du contrepoids d'hommes à qui nous avons à les disputer, bien que nous souffrions à mourir d'avoir à les leur disputer; ce contrepoids supprimé, le charme de la femme tombe.
Marcel Proust,
A la recherche du temps perdu (III, 413)
