Gaze

Gaze means "to look steadily, intently, and with fixed attention."

In one sense, it is a term popularized by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan for the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses a degree of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object. This concept is bound with his theory of the mirror stage, in which a child encountering a mirror realizes that he or she has an external appearance. Lacan suggests that this gaze effect can similarly be produced by any conceivable object such as a chair or a television screen. This is not to say that the object behaves optically as a mirror; instead it means that the awareness of any object can induce an awareness of also being an object.

It has also been called an aspect of one of the "most powerful human forces"; that is, "the meeting of the face and the gaze" because "Only there do we exist for one another."

Numerous existentialists and phenomenologists have addressed the concept of gaze beginning with Jean-Paul Sartre.Foucault elaborated on gaze to illustrate a particular dynamic in power relations and disciplinary mechanisms in his Discipline and Punish. Derrida also elaborated on the relations of animals and humans via the gaze in The Animal That Therefore I Am. The concept of a male gaze was originally theorized by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, and has since been applied to many other forms of media and technology, such as advertisements, the work space, and video games.

Michel Foucault first used the term "medical gaze" in The Birth of the Clinic to explain the process of medical diagnosis, power dynamics between doctors and patients, and the hegemony of medical knowledge in society. He elaborated on the gaze to illustrate a particular dynamic in power relations and disciplinary mechanisms in his Discipline and Punish, such as surveillance and the function of related disciplinary mechanisms and self-regulation in a prison or school as an apparatus of power.

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