In this paper, two papers will be discussed. The first is the chapter from “Practice of Looking” by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. This chapter discusses the control conditions through visual communication analysis of the aspects of authority, power, and knowledge attained. It suggests that to create meaning, a fundamental human function, humans first visually identify objects, their placements, and the organizations of those placements as compositions, then interpret those assemblies in light of their possible meaning or to comprehend that they serve some meaningful purpose. At the same time, the second paper, “Spectatorship and Academic Film Studies,” written by Michele Schreiber, analyzes the psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship in film studies. The paper proposes that gender, race, and orientation impact the spectator’s reading of films. This reaction paper presents that spectatorship is a complicated process affected by gender, race, cultural norms, sex, sexuality, race, and other social factors.
The authors of the book chapter make the case that the spectator, the idealized persona who encounters the image, can be seen as possessing a particular gaze: a sensualized process of looking that frequently assumes a male subject (Cartwright and Sturken 73). They support their claim with feminist readings of psychoanalytic theory. The idea of the male gaze suggests, for instance, that a painting of a naked woman may be created to satisfy the fantasies of the male spectator, revealing the social and economic processes that influence diverse kinds of art (Cartwright and Sturken 76). The male spectator feels he has power over the woman and perhaps overall women even though watching is an act without consequences. Even still, this experience frequently necessitates the viewer giving up some of their agency, such as when the subject observes the image while sitting in a pitch-black room. As feminist theorists investigate the female gaze, the concept of gaze has recently become more complicated (Cartwright and Sturken 78). Even pornography, often cited as an example of the male gaze, is problematic when feminist writers, artists, and scholars utilize it for their ends. When one considers the various forms of subject position in contemporary media environments, the binary idea that one gender gazes at another loses its validity.
Michele Schreiber has also focused a lot of attention on how spectators’ decisions are influenced by their gender, emphasizing that since only boys undergo development, psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship only apply to (heterosexual) male spectators (Schreiber). Furthermore, these ideas assume that all (male) cinema viewers would react to film language in the same way regardless of their historical, cultural, and political context. This ignores cultural and historical variations. The author contends that the film only perpetuates a form of male-driven patriarchal language that promotes masculine visual pleasure because narrative cinema’s language imitates theater elements. Therefore, female viewers can only experience it through the male gaze, continuously objectifying the female viewer’s on-screen counterpart (Schreiber). As a result, the only enjoyment that female viewers get from it is masochistic. She concludes that only by creating a novel sort of narrative-free film language will female viewers be able to experience genuine joy from movies.
Viewing is a complicated process that involves strength, expertise, and the usefulness of an image’s function. Gender, race, cultural norms, sex, sexuality, and other social elements impact viewing. Making images has evolved into a habit of seeing and being seen. Watching is no longer a naive, carefree experience since we know that this equation or exchange exists and does so with prejudice. Instead, it matures the social issue of “truth” and the original freedom of choice.
Works Cited
Cartwright, Lisa, and Marita Sturken. “Chapter 3: Spectatorship, Power and Knowledge.” Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford University Press, New York, 2001, pp. 72–85.
Schreiber, Michele. “Spectatorship and Academic Film Studies.” Filmreference. Web.