ABSTRACT
The gaze is a term that derives from psychoanalysis and, in particular, from the account of vision offered by the French psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan. For Lacanian theory the crucial point is the fact that the gaze is not reducible to human vision. Feminists contend that the cultural products generally presuppose a masculine viewpoint and hence a masculine gaze. In other words, the gaze is largely, if not exclusively, a masculine property or phenomenon and thus implicated in the production and maintenance of gendered social positions. Gender, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, refers primarily to the grammatical classification of nouns. The usage of the term in regard to a person's sex occurs only in colloquial discourse. What this definition omits is the significance of gender - social roles based on biological sex - to western feminist thought. Cultural feminists, maternal feminists, and some radical feminists prefer to retain a close connection between biological sex and social roles.
