Looking is socially regulated: there are social codes of looking (including taboos on
certain kinds of looking). Outline, illustrate and critically discuss everyday codes of looking in the
UK and consider in detail the ways in which these are gender-differentiated.
For general guidance about what is expected in your essays for this module,
see the
general criteria.
Please remember to avoid footnotes and to include an
alphabetical list of 'References' which have been cited in the text
(not a Bibliography of anything you have read for the essay). This list should include
author's names, date, book titles (in italics), place of publication and publisher.
Within the text always cite author's surname, date and page number. Double-space your
text and number your pages. For more detailed notes on writing essays in this
department, click
here.
Advice for this particular assignment:
Read my notes on 'the gaze' first and show evidence
of familiarity with relevant concepts covered, but please don't quote my online notes or lectures directly!
Show evidence of having consulted other people with relation to this issue. In the UK,
who is allowed to look at whom, in what ways and under what circumstances? How do
men look at women, women at men, women at women and men at men (both in everyday life
and in looking at printed or screen images)?
Writing in the early 1970s,
John Berger famously observed that ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’.
Women were objects of 'the male gaze'.
One woman reported to a male friend: ‘One of the things I really envy about men is the
right to look’. She pointed out that in public places, ‘men could look freely at
women, but women could only glance back surreptitiously’ (Dyer 1992, 265).
Brain Pranger (1990) reports on his investigation of 'the gay gaze':
Gay men are able to subtly communicate their shared worldview by a special gaze that seems to be unique to
them... Most gay men develop a canny ability to instantly discern from the returned look of another man
whether or not he is gay. The gay gaze is not only lingering, but also a visual probing... Almost everyone I
interviewed said that they could tell who was gay by the presence or absence of this look.
(in Higgins 1993, 235-6)
Evidence for Berger's observation could easily be found on the covers of magazines at
the time. Is it still true? You may
include an investigation of any differences in the ways in which images of men and women are represented
in magazines in relation to how viewers of different sexes relate to these images
(magazine front covers make a good comparable source of such images). Note in
particular Richard Dyer's comments on differences in the direction of gaze depending on the sex of the model
in pin-ups.
Richard Dyer (1982) describes the gaze of males in images aimed at women (pin-ups, star-portraits, drawings and
paintings):
Where the female model typically averts her eyes, expressing modesty, patience and a lack of interest in
anything else, the male model looks either off or up. In the case of the former, his look suggests an interest in
something else that the viewer cannot see - it certainly doesn’t suggest any interest in the viewer. Indeed, it
barely acknowledges the viewer, whereas the woman’s averted eyes do just that - they are averted from the
viewer. In the cases where the model is looking up, this always suggests a spirituality...: he might be there for
his face and body to be gazed at, but his mind is on higher things, and it is this upward striving that is most
supposed to please... It may be, as is often said, that male pin-ups more often than not do not look at the
viewer, but it is by no means the case that they never do. When they do, what is crucial is the kind of look
that it is, something very often determined by the set of the mouth that accompanies it. When the female
pin-up returns the viewer’s gaze, it is usually some kind of smile, inviting. The male pin-up, even at his most
benign, still stares at the viewer... Since Freud, it is common to describe such a look as ‘castrating’ or
‘penetrating’... (Dyer 1992, 104-9)
Is there any evidence for (or against) Dyer's observations? Do modern gay mags break these conventions?
Focus primarily on the social codes of everyday face-to-face interaction rather than textual codes such
as those in the media. This requires you to draw on the literature of social psychology (e.g. Argyle).
You might include and discuss in your text some photographs (yours or those you've found)
of how people look (or try to avoid looking) in
public places (e.g. the lift or The Tube). Or how about combinations of the social and the textual, as when in everyday
public situations men look at page 3 of The Sun. Does this look to the observer like a 'performance' of
heterosexual masculinity?
Some suggested reading
- Argyle, Michael (1975)
Bodily Communication (2nd edn.). London: Methuen
- Argyle, Michael (1983)
The Psychology of Interpersonal Behaviour (4th edn.).
Harmondsworth: Penguin
- Berger, John (1972)
Ways of Seeing. London: BBC/Harmondsworth: Penguin
- Chandler, Daniel (1998) 'Codes'. In Semiotics for Beginners.
[WWW document] URL
http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem08.html
- Chandler, Daniel (1998) 'Notes on "the Gaze"'. [WWW document] URL
http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/gaze/gaze.html [essential background reading!]
- Denzin, Norman K (1995)
The Cinematic Society: The Voyeur’s Gaze. London: Sage
- Dyer, Richard (1992) ‘Don’t Look Now: The Male Pin-Up’. In
Only Entertainment. London: Routledge
- Gamman, Lorraine & Margaret Marshment (Eds.) (1987)
The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture. London: Women's Press
- Higgins, Patrick (1993)
A Queer Reader. London: Fourth Estate [included here for a passing
reference only]
- Mulvey, Laura (1989)
Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan
- Nixon, Sean (1996)
Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption.
New York: St Martin's Press
- Pranger, Brian (1990)
The Arena of Masculinity. London: GMP
- Pratt, M L (1992)
Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge
- Sturken, Marita & Lisa Cartwright (2001)
Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture.
Oxford: Oxford University Press
- Tagg, John (1988)
The Burden of Representation. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press
- Urry, John (1990)
The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies.
London: Sage; extract available as WWW document URL
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc079ju.html
Note: Treat with extreme caution sources labelled with this symbol!
