In 1866, Gustave Courbet painted a provocative icon of contemporary art. origin of the worldThe painting, which hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, shows a woman’s thighs, torso, partial breasts, and hairy genitalia. This is one of the most beautiful and powerful paintings of her of all time.
Brooklyn-based queer figurative painter Jenna Gribbon paints her partner Mackenzie Scott in a very similar way. In one painting, Scott is lying naked, with his breasts and thighs, pubic hair, and fluorescent pink nipples on a giant canvas.
“I can’t think of any other canonized painting that has remained so shocking.” Gribbon said in an interview with trend(opens in new window) her longing origin of the world“I would have liked the painting more if it had been painted by a woman, but the premise that we all come from a female body is a very human one. It is the opposite of objectifying. It considers the physical and mental realities of a woman’s body.”
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Gribbon and Courbet’s paintings have much in common, but there are distinct differences between the two. It’s the creator’s gender. In my opinion, both artists portray women that some might argue are the female gaze. This is a term in feminist theory that refers to the representation of women in art as a subject with agency. However, many art historians argue that Courbet’s painting must have been made from the male gaze. She doesn’t even have a face to her.
This is a highly controversial topic, and originally used in film, the term seeped deep into the art world.
What is the female gaze?
The female gaze was not coined until feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey began analyzing the male gaze in a 1975 essay.Visual pleasure and narrative films(opens in new window)The male gaze, she writes, projects the male fantasy onto the female figure in the film. to be seen. ”
Through a man’s gaze, women aren’t really human at all. She is the plot her device used to advance the man’s story. “She is the love or the fear that inspired the hero…it is she who makes him act the way he is.” Director Oscar “Bud” Bethecher Jr. said in the 1950s(opens in new window), according to Mulvey. “Women don’t matter in the slightest.”
Dean of the Faculty of Media and Communications at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, The Female Gaze in Documentary Film: An International Perspectiveuses the example of Jane Campion’s 1990 film to illustrate the female gaze angel on my tableIn one scene, some girls enter the woods after a swim, sit and talk, “acting out their femininity,” says French. express women’s culture.”
We have come a long way in the last 48 years. The two are at a tipping point as the art we now embrace has evolved far beyond the language we use to analyze. For one to continue growing, the other must be willing to bend. On TikTok, users talk about the male and female gaze, but the platform on which their art resides demands it, thus distorting the terminology to something that’s not quite right.
Under the gaze of TikTok
If you spend your time online, like Rayne Fisher-Quann, a feminist cultural critic who writes newsletters internet princess(opens in new window)you might think that the female gaze is “good” and the male gaze is “bad”.
TikTok is not Nuance’s platform.
Online, the male gaze “has been used almost exclusively to refer to what men see or want to see,” Fisher-Quan told Mashable. It’s a blatant appropriation where people hear words like ‘the male gaze’ and assume they know what it means.”
There is some truth to the idea that “the male gaze is what men think women want, and the female gaze is what women think women want”. “
For example, on TikTok, some users complain that Ryan Reynolds is hot with male gaze, but Michael Cera is hot with female gaze. A woman’s gaze is when a man wears a skirt and a woman has armpit hair. A man’s gaze is when women have big breasts and men have tight muscles.At some point a few months ago, a user said that a guy named Kevin had “mastered” the female gaze(opens in new window) Playing nervous and awkward before gaining confidence by posting a series of thirst trap videos where he lip-syncs to music. His video went viral, and a comment below the video said he really “understands the female gaze.” Of course, Kevin doesn’t really represent the female gaze, as the term was originally intended. You can’t see it through a lens.Kevin is a real person, and as Dazed points out(opens in new window)he kinda sucks.
In film, the female gaze is seen from three perspectives: the director, the characters in the film, and the audience. On TikTok, she can be alone even when the cameras are off. With the day-to-day videos and the energy of the protagonists and the rhetoric of “do it for the plot,” we’re eroding the line that separates us as humans from us as commodities.
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“People are increasingly using the language of film studies to understand themselves,” said Fisher-Kwan. “Social media has exacerbated the ever-present feeling, especially for women, of having to optimize one’s life for an outside observer and an ever-present consumer in one’s mind. The prevalence of these film studies terms … has to do with the way we package everything for consumption.”
This is nothing new. Languages are constantly changing online. Academic and jargon appear on social media and are completely abused. The unfortunate reality of destroying the very meaning of a phrase is that it becomes gaudy, overused, and most of all, disgusting. But with this reappropriation, we’re taking a social issue—how women are seen, talked about, and marketed—and turning it into something aesthetic.
aesthetics of self
Not everyone believes Courbet’s paintings are feminist.
“The painting has been highly controversial from its inception, and for nearly a century and a half, the small vulva portrait has been passed from male collector to male collector and placed behind curtains, imitation panels, and hinged landscapes. It was hidden.In order for the Musée d’Orsay to copy the painting, wrote in an essay on daily art magazine(opens in new window)“Contemporary art critics have often denounced L’Origine du monde as a symbol of the exploitative male gaze that pervades art history. , what happens to the viewer himself?”
We can debate whether this painting depicts a woman through a man’s gaze, through a woman’s gaze, or neither, simply because it is art.
The problem with discussing yourself as if it were art is that it can be discussed and torn apart as if humanity were not at stake. We’ve been conditioned to believe that our online aesthetic is unique to us humans. The gaze we see is ours.
