Patriarchy
The normalizing power of the gaze reinscribes a patriarchal society fixated on fulfilling sexual desires.
Roof, Judith work ranges through many areas of twentieth-century and contemporary studies, including comparative modernisms; drama and performance studies; film studies; theories of sexuality; science, literature, and culture; and contemporary British and American fiction, 2007 (Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender: Culture Society History, vol. 2. Detroit: Macmillan Reference p.610-612) DJ
To gaze is to look at something, often with concentration, curiosity, or pleasure. Simply gazing is more a practice of contemplation or fascination than it is either a manifestation of voyeurism (looking for the purposes of sexual pleasure) or a practice of surveillance or control associated with various forms of punishment. Gazing constitutes a large portion of cultural activity in modern societies. Theater, film, and television all offer themselves as spectacles to be seen, and form themselves in relation to viewers' predilections. Other venues for gazing include sports, zoos, casinos, travel and sightseeing, and even computer games. As viewers find pleasure in these entertainments, they rarely think about either how the displayed activities are actually arranged to be seen or what power relations there are between the display and the viewer. Viewers often feel they have a choice in how and what they watch, though they are equally powerless to change or often even participate in what they see. Computer games bring a measure of control to the gazer. To gaze may well muster curiosity, sexual pleasure, and issues of power. Sexualized control scenarios tend to gender this power, especially in so far as gazing is associated with active volition, whereas the image or object to be looked at is associated with passivity and sometimes victimhood. In its connections to the activity and phallic character of looking, gazing is often associated with masculinity and looking with sexual aggressiveness. The image or object to be looked at is associated with femininity and passive objecthood. Thus, in its most extreme forms, gazing is linked both to gender stereotypes and to less traditional sexual satisfactions such as scopophilia, or pleasure in watching, and the passive/active dynamics of sadomasochism. Voyeurism and scopophilia are most often practiced by males, sometimes in public spaces such as strip shows and pornographic films, sometimes privately as with pornographic magazines and Internet sites, and sometimes illegally and covertly as peeping toms. Often voyeuristic activities are restricted to certain areas and to adult consumers; sometimes voyeurism is a crime. Exhibitionism, or setting out one's sexual organs to be seen, is practiced by both males and females, often, though not always, as a component of sexual arousal. Males constitute the majority of those who expose their genitals to strangers; doing so constitutes the crime of indecent exposure. Sigmund Freud theorized that those who enjoy exhibitionism also wish to look, while those who look also wish to be seen. Gazing also reflects and effects a complex distribution of power that in its sexualized form constitutes sadomasochism, or sexual pleasure derived from taking or relinquishing power. To be constrained as the object of someone else's gaze is to be in the watcher's power. The viewer may wield sadistic power in humiliating what he or she watches. At the same time, the one who offers her- or himself up to the gaze might exert a certain power in commanding the gaze as well as in delaying or withholding full view. The one who watches may be constrained from doing more than watching, experiencing a type of bondage produced by the rules of viewing. Most often what is offered for view is presented in costumes designed to constrain movement, limit access, and signal the distribution of power via leather, chains, harnesses, and masks.
The development of cinema has reproduce a new panoptic structure where women are created a powerless object
Block, Marcelline has a BA, Harvard; MA, Princeton; PhD candidate, Princeton is Lecturer in History at Princeton, 2008 ( Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema. Newcastle upon Tyne, GBR: Cambridge Scholars Publishing) DJ
Laura Mulvey’s work launched the field of feminist film theory in the 1970s. Mulvey’s foundational essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) explained the impact of visual relations and gender in celluloid and formed the basis for most subsequent psychoanalytic readings of women in film. Specifically, Mulvey notes that Hollywood narrative film construed looking relations, or more properly, the investment of pleasure in looking relations, as relying on the operation of a gendered binary, with man as “bearer of the look” and woman as “object of the gaze.” Today, this observation informs readings of nearly all visual media, despite the advances that Mulvey, among others, have noted in technologies that have profoundly altered what can be packed into a second of screen time. 7 Feminist film theorists such as Barbara Creed, Cynthia Freeland, and Sue Thornham have long worked to account for different gazes and subject positions in order to supplement and/or problematize the heteronormative binary of Mulvey’s theory of subjectobject looking relations. 8 Considerations of the gaze in feminist psychoanalytic readings can also work against a primary circumstance of power formation. The distinction between who— or what— is doing the looking and who— or what— is being observed is an important binary. In his 1975 Surveiller et punir (translated in 1977 as Discipline and Punish ), Michel Foucault identified the function of this binary through the social operation of carceral and educational authority. Foucault’s figural Panopticon, like Jeremy Bentham’s literal prison design, deprives certain subjects of any gaze, transforming looking relations into power relations, an ability to discipline and punish without physical violence or bodily disfiguration. 9 This binary also evokes Lacan’s sardine can, which is seen as an object precisely because it does not possess a gaze with which to look back at the seeing subject. By considering power or function separately from gender, one can problematize the unspoken assumption that an attractive woman will be the powerless object of the gaze in narrative films. For example, Linda Williams notes that female subjects in horror films often have the first access to a gaze that incorporates a view of the monster, but this gaze translates into victimization, a circumstance that Cynthia Freeland sees as symptomatic of the bleak horizon for feminist studies of horror. 10 I would like to suggest that, if not a recuperation, at least a revision of Freeland’s claim is possible.
White Gaze
To conceptualize the presence of power the USFG has over our bodies is not wrong, but to disassociate that power as something wholly external to yourself is an error of the framers and debaters who do not recognize the false cognition of non-white bodies that has left many under the watch of the White Gaze.
Deborah Heggs, 11-19-2013, ("The White Gaze – Is it Fear or Racism?," Guardian Liberty Voice, http://guardianlv.com/2013/11/the-white-gaze-is-it-fear-or-racism/ Read more at http://guardianlv.com/2013/11/the-white-gaze-is-it-fear-or-racism/#fZQjZylwQfYDjQvb.99) DJ
The White Gaze should be terrifying to anyone aware of its meaning. Not only does it strike without warning; but in many cases, it takes, and destroys lives when it does. Is the White Gaze fear or racism? Though it’s not a physical ailment, the White Gaze is a debilitating sickness, caused by the horribly apathetic state of mind, called racism. It can cause such mental devastation that even if you survive, the pain is indelibly etched on your brain with heart-wrenching torment. George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University stated in a recent article, that the White Gaze is the fear that white people have of blacks. In short, it’s defined as looking at the world through the eyes of a white person who has undertones of, or is blatant in, their racism. Simply put, the gaze means that you that you have no right to belong. You have no right to belong in certain neighborhoods; you have no right to belong in certain schools. And if you’re black, you have no right to belong anywhere that those affected by the White Gaze feel that you shouldn’t be. When those who are gazing see you as a threat, or someone to be feared, even if the feeling is contrived, murder often follows. Sadly, for many, being at the wrong place or in the wrong situation has proven fatal. Many Michigan residents are outraged of the November 2nd murder of 19-year-old Renisha McBride. Even more are wondering if 54-year-old Theodore P. Wafer was afflicted by the White Gaze when he took the life of this innocent, unarmed, young black woman. Wafer, of Dearborn Heights, Michigan shot McBride in the face with a shotgun when she knocked on his front door seeking help after being in a car accident. Sources say that McBride, who had been drinking crashed her car sometime around 1:00 a.m. A woman at the scene said that Miss McBride sustained minor injuries from the accident and was bleeding from the head. According to the unidentified woman, McBride kept saying “I want to go home.” According to sources, McBride, who appeared shaky and disoriented left the scene and somehow wandered to Wafer’s front porch. The distressed and dazed McBride knocked on Wafer’s door seeking help, but instead, she was met with a deadly shotgun blast which ended her young life. The question again arises, was the White Gaze responsible for Police shooting and killing 24-year-old Jonathan Ferrell? Reports indicate that Ferrell, an unarmed black man, was shot and killed by police in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ferrell, who was in a devastating car crash on Saturday, September 14, 2013, ran towards Police for help, but instead he was tased and shot to death. The former Florida A&M University football star was seeking assistance after he was in a serious car wreck. According to Police Chief Rodney Monroe, Ferrell more than likely climbed out of the back window of his badly damaged vehicle and ran to the closest house for help. Upon answering the door, the homeowner inside thought it was her husband knocking at the door, but opened the door to find Ferrell. Chief Monroe further stated that the woman closed the door, hit her panic alarm and called 911. When Police arrived at the scene, a man matching the homeowner’s description of Ferrell ran towards them. Upon seeing the young black man running in their direction, one officer fired his stun gun, but Ferrell still ran towards them for help. At that time Officer Randall Kerrick opened fire; shooting Ferrell multiple times, killing him at the scene. No one gave Jonathan Ferrell the benefit-of-doubt because in their eyes, he didn’t belong. Undoubtedly, the most publicized story of the White Gaze is that of George Zimmerman. For over a year, papers were satiated with news of the 28-year-old man who took the life of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. Zimmerman, who was a neighborhood watch patrolman in Sanford, Florida for a private community, stalked and fatally shot Martin, because in his eyes, Martin didn’t belong in the gated community which he was patrolling. After police arrived, Zimmerman, an armed White-Hispanic man was taken to the hospital for head injuries. While Trayvon Martin, an unarmed young Black man, was taken to the morgue. Though no one can say for sure that these murders were White Gaze related, we can undoubtedly say, that they were senseless. When life is lost to violence, it doesn’t matter whether it’s because of the White Gaze, fear, blinding racism or just plain-old-hatred, it doesn’t diminish the pain of those left behind. Though we may never know the true motive for these senseless acts of violence, one certainty prevails, “No one knows what lurks in the hearts of men,” but men themselves. And the White Gaze is proof-positive of that.
Through inheriting the oppositional gaze, the Black Body can form a resisitance against dominating modes of power and gain possible agency
Bell Hooks, 1992 (Boston: South End Press, “Black Looks: Race and Representation pg115-116,” http://www.umass.edu/afroam/downloads/reading14.pdf) DJ
When thinking about black female spectators, I remember being punished as a child for staring, for those hard intense direct looks children would give grown-ups, looks that were seen as confrontational, as gestures of resistance, challenges to authority. The "gaze" has always been political in my life. Imagine the terror felt by the child who has come to understand through repeated punishments that one's gaze can be dangerous. The child who has learned so well to look the other way when necessary. Yet, when punished, the child is told by parents, "Look at me when I talk to you." Only, the child is afraid to look. Afraid to look, but fascinated by the gaze. There is power in looking. Amazed the first time I read in history classes that white slaveowners (men, women, and children) punished enslaved black people for looking, I wondered how this traumatic relationship to the gaze had informed black parenting and black spectatorship. The politics of slavery, of racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze. Connecting this strategy of domination to that used by grown folks in southern black rural communities where I grew up, I was pained to think that there was no absolute difference between whites who had oppressed black people and ourselves. Years later, reading Michel Foucault, I thought again about these connections, about the ways power as domination reproduces itself in different locations employing similar apparatuses, strategies, and mechanisms of control. Since I knew as a child that the dominating power adults exercised over me and over my gaze was never so absolute that I did not dare to look, to sneak a peep, to stare dangerously, I knew that the slaves had looked. That all attempts to repress our/black peoples' right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality." Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one's gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency. In much of his work, Michel Foucault insists on describing domination in terms of "relations of power" as part of an effort to challenge the assumption that "power is a system of domination which controls everything and which leaves no room for freedom." Emphatically stating that in all relations of power "there is necessarily the possibility of resistance," he invites the critical thinker to search those margins, gaps, and locations on and through the body where agency can be found. Stuart Hall calls for recognition of our agency as black spectators in his essay "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation." Speaking against the construction of white representations of blackness as totalizing, Hall says of white presence: "The error is not to conceptualize this 'presence' in terms of power, but to locate that power as wholly external to us—as extrinsic force, whose influence can be thrown off like the serpent sheds its skin. What Franz Fanon reminds us, in Black Skin, White Masks, is how power is inside as well as outside: .. .the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the Other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self. This "look," from—so to speak—the place of the Other, fixes us, not only in its violence, hostility and aggression, but in the ambivalence of its desire. Spaces of agency exist for black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see. The "gaze" has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people globally. Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that "looks" to document, one that is oppositional. In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating "awareness" politicizes "looking" relations—one learns to look a certain way in order to resist.
Biopower Surveillance electronically extends panoptic power – that results in biopolitical control over the populace
Koskela 3 – Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Helsinki (FI) (Hille, Vol 1, No 3 (2003): Foucault and Panopticism Revisited, “‘Cam Era’ — the contemporary urban Panopticon”, http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles1(3)/camera.pdf // SM)
In Michel Foucault’s words, Jeremy Bentham – the designer of the Panopticon – ‘invented a technology of power designed to solve the problems of surveillance’ (1980: 148). The idea of video surveillance is almost literally the same: a technological solution designed to solve the problems of surveillance in urban space. People under surveillance are – as in the Panopticon – to be seen but to never know when or by whom; under control but without physical intervention. Recently, the number of surveillance cameras in urban space has grown massively (different cities in detail, see e.g. Takala, 1998; Lyon, 2002; McCahill and Norris, 2002; Töpfer et al., forthcoming). It can be claimed that through surveillance cameras the panoptic technology of power has been electronically extended: our cities have become like enormous Panopticons (Lyon, 1994; Fyfe and Bannister, 1998; Tabor, 2001). A number of authors have pointed out that the surveillance of cities shows interesting and important parallels to Foucault’s thought (Fyfe and Bannister, 1996; Herbert, 1996; Soja, 1996; Hannah, 1997b; Norris and Armstrong, 1999; Fox, 2001 among others). Cities, like the Panopticon, can be seen as a ‘laboratory of power’ (Foucault, 1977: 204). In both cases surveillance ‘links knowledge, power and space’ (Herbert, 1996: 49). In cities, the routine of surveillance makes the use of power almost instinctive: people are controlled, categorised, disciplined and normalised without any particular reason.
Computerized surveillance purifies and homogenizes urban space, eventually ending in its total destruction
Koskela 3 – Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Helsinki (FI) (Hille, Vol 1, No 3 (2003): Foucault and Panopticism Revisited, “‘Cam Era’ — the contemporary urban Panopticon”, http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles1(3)/camera.pdf // SM)
The critique of increasing surveillance has focused on the presumed changes it might cause in space and social practices. It is feared that surveillance will lead to a ‘vicious circle of defence’. It is likely to make urban space segregated, polarised, more difficult to approach and stay in, less lively, less spontaneous and even ‘dead’ (Davis, 1990; Flusty, 1994; Mitchell, 1995; Ellin, 1997; Koskela, 2000a). Furthermore, surveillance can be used as a tool for reinforcing the ‘purification’ and ‘homogenisation’ processes of urban space. What follows is ‘[t]he destruction of the street, or city centre, as an arena for the celebration of difference’ (Bannister et al., 1998: 26). The urban experience of being watched through a surveillance camera is, naturally, only one of the approaches to surveillance. With computerisation, surveillance is becoming more subtle and intense. It also spreads from material space to cyberspace. It has been argued that the real ‘superpanopticon’ exists in electronic environments – in the ‘word wide web of surveillance’ (Lyon, 2001). The ‘webcams’ distribute images to the audience on the Internet connecting ‘local gazes’ with the global community (Green, 1999). Local presence is replaced not by absence but, rather, by ‘tele-presence’ (Virilio, 2002: 109). The computer integrated surveillance systems link visible surveillance to the other forms of technological control (e.g. Curry, 1997; Graham, 1998; Whitaker, 1999). When surveillance cameras are combined with visitors’ registers and ‘people-finding tools’, such as face recognition systems, supervision touches a wide range of issues around privacy and human rights. While older surveillance systems mainly watched over the public as anonymous crowd new technologies make it possible to recognise individuals and to combine faces to data bases of criminals, activists, etc. We are accompanied by our ‘data doubles’ (Lyon, 2002) or ‘digital individuals’ (Curry, 1997), and this ‘exponentially increases’ the panoptic power of surveillance (Norris, 2002: 270). ‘Telesurveillance’ is the main component of representation and control in what has been called ‘the era of the great global optic’ (Virilio, 2002: 110).
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