Female gaze

The Female Gaze is a Feminist film theoretical term representing the gaze of the female viewer. It is a response to Laura Mulvey's term, "the male gaze," which represents not only the gaze of the male viewer but also the gaze of the male character and the male creator of the film.

In Laura Mulvey's article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," she discusses aspects of voyeurism and fetishism in the Male Gaze. She uses Alfred Hitchcock's film, Rear Window, in her article, 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.

The female gaze looks at three viewpoints.

These three viewpoints also concern Mulvey's male gaze but focuses, instead, on females. Viewpoints expanded alongside diversity in film genres. Woman's films were a genre that focused on female leads, showing the female as a diegetic story-teller rather than that of a spectacle. Movies such as Rebecca and Stella Dallas are examples of such films in which the traditional narrative is told through the female protagonist. This genre of film has evolved into modern day "chick flicks" such as 27 Dresses and The Devil Wears Prada. The films are meant to represent the desires of female protagonists and, therefore, are to represent the desires of the female movie-viewer.

Zoe Dirse looks at the female gaze through the documentary film genre. Dirse, being a documentary film cinematographer, analyzes the aspects of pleasure and viewer identification in her own films. The female gaze can be analyzed both at the points of production and reception. Dirse takes on the aspects of sexual difference and identification through production and cites Anne Ross Muir in her discussions on the male gaze as being prevalent in film merely because it is a male dominated industry. However, if the cinematographer is female and the spectacle is also female, the object of the film takes on a different role. According to Mulvey, the view of the camera has voyeuristic aspects merely because a male is doing the filming.Yet, the viewpoint is not merely limited to male and female as race and sexual orientation also have a presence. In looking at her own films, Dirse deconstructs the male gaze, arguing that by having a female cinematographer allows females to be viewed as they really are and not the voyeuristic spectacle that the male gaze makes them out to be. While filming in a Cairo, Dirse is in a crowd and notes being noticed by the different males around her. At first they seemed curious and Dirse wonders if it was because of her gender or the fact that she had a camera. It isn't long before they begin to push past her and she feels a sense of danger that she believes women in Cairo also feel. This is depicted in her film, Shadow Maker. She also cites that her being female allowed her to be an unobtrusive observer when filming gypsies singing. These female gypsies are able to act as they normally would because of Dirse's gender. This affects the final product of the film as a male observer would not be able to capture the same image.

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