gaze

Laura Mulvey first introduced the theory of the gaze in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Screen magazine (1975). She argued that women are objectified and stereotyped on the screen because of the way cinema is structured around three male ways of looking-or ‘gazes’. First, the way the camera looks in any filmed situation is voyeuristic, as most films are made by men; second, there is the gaze of men within a particular film itself, which is structured to make women appear as objects of their gaze; third, there is the gaze of the actual male spectator. Mulvey's theory was much influenced by Jacques Lacan's ideas about psychoanalysis. It has become important in feminist art theory and it has since been argued there is a female gaze as well as a male gaze.

Sociologists are increasingly beginning to consider the importance of visual representation in everyday life; arguably the distinction between social analysis and visual representation has become less clear-cut. Elizabeth Chaplin's Sociology and Visual Representation (1994) contains a good discussion of some key areas. The concept of gaze is increasingly seen as being important to the discussion of more traditional sociological topics-such as that of the family. Thus, for example, drawing on Michel Foucault's theory of the panopticon , as well as Bryan Turner's writings about the body, David H. J. Morgan has argued that the parental gaze over children is an important aspect of surveillance within families (see Family Connections: An Introduction to Family Studies, 1996).