ABSTRACT
Some of the most interesting early observations about the representation of gender in visual images were made by John Berger in the television series Ways of Seeing. What was unusual about his method was that, instead of adopting a traditional art historical approach that is primarily concerned with major masterpieces by great artists, he took as his starting point the question of how individuals look at visual images. Thus he observed: ‘Women are depicted in a quite different way from men —not because the feminine is different from the masculine-but because the “ideal” spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of woman is designed to flatter him’ (1972:64). This led to the idea that social behaviour is a determinant of the conventions which structure cultural forms. This underlies Berger’s muchquoted observation that ‘Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (ibid.: 47) and that the gendered look informs the criteria and conventions which govern the way women and men are depicted within the tradition of European oil painting. The connection which Berger made between the act of looking in everyday life and the structures of looking encoded in visual images is one which has subsequently received much attention in work on gender representation. The idea of the male gaze has become, in Camille Paglia’s words, a ‘stale cliché…that tiresome assumption of feminist discourse’ (1992:85). But, as Ann Daly had previously observed: ‘As tiresome as this term has become, it remains a fundamental concept: that, in modern western societies the one who sees and the one who is seen are gendered positions’ (1989: 25). This chapter applies the idea of the gendered gaze to dance.
