Her interest in scopophilia (aka "deriving pleasure from looking") in traditional Hollywood films leads her to consider a woman's body primarily as a fetish, destined for easy consumption — i.e.
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I have written about two of Satterlee's prior exhibitions, a 217 three-artist show at Valentine in Ridgewood, Queens, where she shared the space with the sculptors David Henderson and Jude Tallichet, and Already Gone, a 210 solo at the Martin Art Gallery of Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which was later featured at Gold/scopophilia in Montclair, New Jersey.
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Lacan's conceptual development of the gaze linked the pleasure of scopophilia to the person's apprehension of the Other (person) who is not the Self; that is: "The gaze is this object lost, and suddenly re-found, in the conflagration of shame, by the introduction of the Other."Lacan, Jaxques, p. 183. The practice of scopophilia is how a person's desire is captured by the imaginary representation of the Other.Lacan, Jacques.
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The film critic Laura Mulvey coined the term male gaze, which is conceptually contrasted with and opposed by the female gaze. As a way of seeing women and the world, the psychology of the male gaze is comparable to the psychology of scopophilia, the pleasure of looking; thus, the terms scopophilia and scoptophilia identify both the aesthetic pleasures and the sexual pleasures derived from looking at someone or something.
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Erving Goffman, Relations in Public (1972) p. 415 Many scopophobia patients develop habits of voyeurism or exhibitionism. Another related, yet very different syndrome, scopophilia, is the excessive enjoyment of looking at erotic items.
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Nonetheless, in Roll over Adorno: Critical Theory, Popular Culture, Audiovisual Media (2006) other analyses indicate that theories of scopophilia and the male gaze scapegoat the variegated pleasures of watching a narrative film as entertainment.
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Jackson, Ronald L. II (ed.), (2010). Encyclopedia of Identity. SAGE Publications. Sexual in origin, the concept of scopophilia has voyeuristic, exhibitionistic and narcissistic overtones and it is what keeps the male audience’s attention on the screen.
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In this manner, male spectators come to indirectly possess the woman on screen as well. Furthermore, Mulvey explores the concept of scopophilia in relation to two axes: one of activity and one of passivity. This “binary opposition is gendered.”Smelik, Anneke (1998).
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Theory, p. 71. That the impersonal interaction of scopophilia (between the looker and the looked-at) sometimes replaced personal interactions in the psychological life of a person who is socially anxious, and seeks to avoid feelings of guilt.Fenichel, Otto. Theory, p. 348.
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In his essay "Horror as Critique in Tell Me Something and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," Kyu Hyun Kim writes that Tell Me Something plays with the idea of scopophilia in order to comment on both male gaze and the horror genre. He cites Laura Mulvey as asserting of the horror genre that "the female body tends to be objectified by the male viewer... resulting in 'fetishistic scopophilia', the pleasure derived from looking at the female body, idealized as a beautiful and perfect object, and sadistic voyeurism, which stems from the fear of castration" (Kim, 107). Soo- yeon's father derives fetishistic pleasure from making the young Soo-yeon stand for painting and photographing her. Her college acquaintance and stalker also photographs her to build a shrine, and Detective Jo repeatedly gazes at her via surveillance camera.
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On Psychopathology (PFL 10) pp. 112–113. In contrast to Freud's interpretation of the scopic drive, other psychoanalytic theories proposed that the practices of scopophilia might lead to madness — either insanity or a mental disorder — which is the scopophilic person's retreat from the concrete world of reality into an abstract world of fantasy.Fenichel, Otto. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 177.
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A woman being the passive object of the male gaze is the link to scopophilia, to the aesthetic pleasure derived from looking at someone as an object of beauty. As an expression of sexuality, scopophilia refers to the pleasure (sensual and sexual) derived from looking at sexual fetishes and photographs, pornography and naked bodies, etc. There are two categories of pleasurable viewing: (i) voyeurism, wherein the viewer's pleasure is in looking at another person from a distance, and he or she projects fantasies, usually sexual, onto the gazed upon person; and (ii) narcissism, wherein the viewer's pleasure is in self-recognition when viewing the image of another person. That in order to enjoy a film as a woman, or as a person of any gender other than the male gender, women must learn to identify with the male protagonist and assume his perspective, the male gaze.
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The painting that scared Su-Yeon as a child and appears over the opening credits is a recreation of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt, which in turn references De humani corporis fabrica, recalling the anatomy theater of the Renaissance. Kim writes that Tell Me Something directly engages the idea of scopophilia to purposefully draw attention to horror spectatorship and play with the voyeuristic nature of the viewer.
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Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" focuses on the gaze of the spectator from a Freudian perspective. Freud's concept of scopophilia relates to the objectification of women in art works. The gaze of the viewer is, in essence, a sexually charged instinct. Because of the gender inequity that exists in the art sphere, the artist's portrayal of a subject is generally a man's portrayal of women.
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A feminist experimental film, Riddles of the Sphinx was partly inspired by Mulvey's work on feminist film theory of scopophilia and the male gaze, particularly her influential 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. As she wrote that classical Hollywood cinema favoured the male spectator and his desire to gaze at women, Mulvey and Wollen's film is "an attempt to merge modernist forms with a narrative exploring feminism and psychoanalytical theory". At the time, much of British experimental and avant-garde film was anti-narrative, and so the film is part of a movement that set out to explore and create a feminist language for cinema outside of traditional narrative norms. In her writing on feminist film theory, Mulvey has argued that, if the dominant cinema produces pleasure through scopophilia which favours the male gaze and festishization of woman as object, then alternative versions of cinema need to construct different forms of pleasure based on psychic relations that adopt a feminist perspective.
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Alongside Doe's collection are a number of other artists represented by the Deutsche Bank New York that share his artistic strategies. These artists included, but are not limited to, Nina Bovasso, Tom Burckhardt, Ken Butler, Marc Dean Veca, Tim Maul, and Charles Spurrier. Doe's work evolved into the focus of the female body. In an interview by Pierogi, Don Doe explores his thoughts on the transition into a new set of works; titled Scopophilia.
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According to Anneke Smelik, Professor of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Radboud University, classic cinema encourages the deep desire to look through the incorporation of structures of voyeurism and narcissism into the narrative and image of the film. As regards the narcissistic overtone of scopophilia, narcissistic visual pleasure can arise from self-identification with the image. In Mulvey’s view, male spectators project their look, and thus themselves, onto the male protagonists.
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In her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey introduced the second-wave feminist concept of "male gaze" as a feature of gender power asymmetry in film. The concept was present in earlier studies of the gaze, but it was Mulvey who brought it to the forefront. Mulvey stated that women were objectified in film because heterosexual men were in control of the camera. Hollywood films played to the models of voyeurism and scopophilia.
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The act of staring implies a visual focus, where the subject of the gaze is objectified. This has been the subject of psychoanalytical studies on the nature of scopophilia, with a subsequent development in some aspects of feminist thought (see Gaze, film, photography and voyeurism). Paradoxically, the notion of staring also implicates the looker in constructing themselves as a subject. Sartre was interested in the individual experiencing shame only when they perceive that their shameful act is being witnessed by another.
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54 have led to interpretations of a homoerotic sensibility in the novel. Laura Mulvey added a theory of scopophilia and masculine and feminine subjectivity/objectivity. This version tends to inform interpretations of Britten's opera, perhaps owing to the composer's own homosexuality. In her book Epistemology of the Closet (1990/2008), Eve Sedgwick, expanding on earlier interpretations of the same themes, posits that the interrelationships between Billy, Claggart and Captain Vere are representations of male homosexual desire and the mechanisms of prohibition against this desire.
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Sigmund Freud used the term scopophilia to describe, analyse, and explain the concept of , the pleasure in looking,Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1994) p. 194. a curiosity which he considered a partial-instinct innate to the childhood process of forming a personality;Freud, Sigmund Freud On Sexuality (PFL 7) pp. 109–110. and that such a pleasure-instinct might be sublimated, either into Aesthetics, looking at objets d'art or sublimated into an obsessional neurosis "a burning and tormenting curiosity to see the female body", which afflicted the Rat Man patient of the psychoanalyst Freud.
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Critical race theorists, such as bell hooks, in "Eating Each Other" (2006),bell hooks, "Eating the Other", 2006 Shannon Winnubst in "Is the Mirror Racist?: Interrogating the Space of Whiteness" (2006),Shannon Winnubst, "Is the Mirror Racist?: Interrogating the Space of Whiteness", (2006) and David Marriott in "Bordering On: The Black Penis" (1996),David Marriott, "Bordering On: The Black Penis", (1996), Textual Practice 10(1), pp. 9–28. present and describe scopophilia and the scopic drive as the psychological and social mechanisms that realize the practices of Other-ing a person to exclude them from society. (c.f.
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The mentally ill protagonist acted as he acted consequent to severe mental mistreatment in boyhood, by his film-maker father; the paternal abuse mentally malformed Mark into a reclusive, introverted man comfortable with torturing and killing people. In the 1970s, parting from Lacan's propositions, psychoanalysts of the cinema used the term scopophilia to identify and to describe the aesthetic and emotional pleasures (often pathological), and other unconscious mental processes that occur in the minds spectators gazing at a film.Jane Mills,"The Money Shot" (2001) , p. 223John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (1995) , p.
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In Psycho (1960), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the protagonist Norman Bates is a voyeur whose motel rooms feature peepholes. In the course of the story, the motel manager Norman spies upon the anti-heroine as she undresses in her ostensibly private room. In Peeping Tom (1960), directed by Michael Powell, Scopophilia is mentioned as a psychological affliction of the protagonist, Mark Lewis. As narrative cinema, Peeping Tom is a deliberate exercise in voyeurism for the protagonist and for the spectator, which demonstrates how readily the protagonist and the spectator are mentally willing and morally capable of watching atrocities (torture, mutilation, death) that should not be gazed upon as narrative movies.
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Two forms of the male gaze are based upon the Freudian concept of scopophilia, the "pleasure that is linked to sexual attraction (voyeurism in the extreme) and [the] scopophilic pleasure that is linked to narcissistic identification (the introjection of ideal egos)", which show how women have been forced to view the cinema from the perspectives (sexual, aesthetic, cultural) of the male gaze. In such cinematic representations, the male gaze denies the female's agency and human identity, thus dehumanizing a woman, from person to object, to be considered only for her beauty, physique, and sex appeal, as defined in the male sexual fantasy of narrative cinema.
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In Peter Jackson's The Two Towers, Saruman uses the Orthanc Palantír, the camera giving an overview as shown, and then zooming in, like a Palantír itself, providing the viewer with an omniscient picture of the whole of Middle-earth. A palantír appears in the film director Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films. The Tolkien critic Allison Harl compares Jackson to Saruman, and his camera to a palantír, writing that "Jackson chooses to look through the perilous lens, putting his camera to use to exert control over the [original Tolkien] text." Harl cites Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema" which describes "scopophilia", the voyeuristic pleasure of looking, based on Sigmund Freud's writings on sexuality.
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Van Rensburg moved to Asia in 2003, forming the recording label South of the Border, and released five solo albums: Concrete (2007), chamber music performed by the Poisondwarf Esemble; Unfinished Cities (2008), recorded in Japan and Taiwan with koto player Mori Chieko; Scopophilia (7 etudes for solo bondage guitar) (2008); Kopstukke Vol. 1 (the first in a series of nine albums of new compositions for classical guitar, 2011); and Game of the Voce (2011). In 2009 he collaborated with South African expats Louis Minnaar and Jean Marais (also known as MoShang) and released the album Eentonig through the Onse Plate label. He has recently scored music for award-winning Thai film director Pramotz Sangsorn and creates various sound installations internationally.
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In the process, he also stalks Veronica across campus, following her to courses such as "Gender and the Consumerist Impulse" and "From Ahab to Prufrock: Tragically Flawed Hero(in)es in American Literature." While his relationship with Sara becomes more serious, David remains obsessed with Veronica, who he learns (from her Facebook photos) is dating an attractive, wealthy senior, Liam, from one of the school's final clubs. When the first paper is due for "From Ahab to Prufrock," he helps her write a paper on the theme of scopophilia in Henry James' Daisy Miller. Meanwhile, David and Sara's relationship continues to develop until they engage in multiple acts of sex, the first for both of them; Sara is reluctant, but David presses her to acquiesce.
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Mulvey discusses aspects of voyeurism and fetishism in the male gaze in her article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". She draws from Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film, Rear Window, applying terms from Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis to discuss camera angle, narrative choice, and props in the movie while focusing on the concept of the male gaze. From what Jeffries, the protagonist in Rear Window, looks at through his camera to the camera angles in his discussion with his girlfriend, the male gaze is accentuated by each move in Mulvey's article. Mulvey's article focused on the concept of "scopophilia", or a pleasure in gazing and placed women as spectacles to be objectified and viewed, unable to return a gaze and dismissing women in film as adequate representations of human beings.
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In 1960, Miller portrayed Piggy in Robert Siodmaks The Rough and the Smooth opposite Tony Britton, William Bendix and Edward Chapman. He played Dr. Pfeiffer in the episode Twentieth Century Theatre: The Price of Freedom of the BBC Sunday Night Play. The same year, Miller starred in Michael Powell's psychological horror thriller Peeping Tom, playing a doctor who the main protagonist (Karlheinz Böhm), a serial killer who murders women while using a portable movie camera fitted with a spike to record their dying expressions of terror, approaches to cure his scopophilia. It was a controversial film at the time of release with themes of child abuse, sadomasochism and fetishism, although Miller's performance, played comically, stood in contrast to the film's dark themes, and it has since gained a cult following and is now considered a masterpiece.
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With reference to the Big Brother television shows of Endemol Entertainment, in which a group of people live in a container studio apartment and allow themselves to be recorded constantly, Weibel argued that the panopticon provides the masses with "the pleasure of power, the pleasure of sadism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, scopophilia, and narcissism". In 2006, Shoreditch TV became available to residents of the Shoreditch in London, so that they could tune in to watch CCTV footage live. The service allowed residents "to see what's happening, check out the traffic and keep an eye out for crime". In their 2004 book Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control, Derrick Jensen and George Draffan called Bentham "one of the pioneers of modern surveillance" and argued that his panopticon prison design serves as the model for modern supermaximum security prisons, such as Pelican Bay State Prison in California.
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She argues that progress towards equality will be made when both men and women can move freely between the position of subject and object; not when men are objectified just as women have been. In Jessica Taylor's Romance and the female gaze obscuring gendered violence in the Twilight Saga, Taylor criticizes the emerging female gaze and how it interacts with romance to portray violent male bodies as desirable. She focuses on the very popular Twilight Saga, which she describes as seemingly retrograde and naive in its use of romance conventions. To explain how the female gaze works to create violent male bodies as desirable, she looks back on the work of Mulvey and her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Specifically, she focuses on the notion of “fetishistic scopophilia” that was previously used by Mulvey to explain how the anxiety-inducing female body becomes fetishized and a source of pleasure for the male viewer.
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The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre introduced the concept of le regard, the gaze, in Being and Nothingness (1943), wherein the act of gazing at another human being creates a subjective power difference, which is felt by the gazer and by the gazed, because the person being gazed at is perceived as an object, not as a human being. The cinematic concept of the male gaze is presented, explained, and developed in the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), in which Laura Mulvey proposes that sexual inequality — the asymmetry of social and political power between men and women — is a controlling social force in the cinematic representations of the sexes; and that the male gaze (the aesthetic pleasure of the male viewer) is a social construct derived from the ideologies and discourses of patriarchy. Preview. Also available as: Pdf via Amherst College. In the fields of media studies and feminist film theory, the male gaze is conceptually related to the behaviours of voyeurism (looking as sexual pleasure), scopophilia (pleasure from looking), and narcissism (pleasure from contemplating one's self).
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