Gender Representation Laura Mulvey's The Male Gaze and Miriam Hansons The Female Gaze -

Gender - 

Objectification : When someone is treated as an object who can be owned or possessed by another.

Voyeurism : A perversion in which a person receives sexual gratification from seeing sexual images.

Archetype : Someone whose appearance and behaviour match a stereotype.

Stereotype : A label attached to someone based upon a social factor such as gender, class, ethnicity, culture, religion etc.

Hegemony :  Dominance of one state over another social group e.g. men over women.

Laura Mulvey's The Male Gaze (1975) :
1. How men look at women
2. How women look at themselves
3. How women look at other women

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema :

• Women are presented as a sexual spectacle as objects of pleasure for the characters and audience. 
• Audiences experience film through the view of a heterosexual male.
• Women are always starting from an 'unequal' beginning.
• The camera present women as sexualised for men's pleasure.
• Men fetishise women which is referred to as 'fetishitistic scopophilia'. 
• Men have this gaze to avoid being 'castrated'.

Features of the Male Gaze :

• The camera lingers on the curves of female bodies and women are presented in the context of mens reactions to the events. 
• Women are relegated to the status of an object. 
• Female viewers experience film narratives secondarily by identification with the male.

Male Gaze in Advertising :

• Theorists have also noted that the female body is often used in advertising even when it has nothing to do with the product being advertised.

Jonathan Schroeder (1998) :

• "to gaze implies more than to look at - it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior the object of the gaze".

Criticisms of Mulvey and The Male Gaze Theory :

• Some women enjoy being looked at such as beauty pageant contestants.
• The gaze is not always used sexually but also to compare body image or clothing etc.
• The theory does not consider female spectators, only heterosexual males.
• Since the 1980s there has been a large increase in the sexualisation of the male body. 

Charlie's Angels Gender Representations :

Empowerment:

1. Riding a motorbike

2. Owning a Ferrari 

3. Using sexuality as a power mechanism

4. Saving men

5. Fighting men

6. Adrenaline sports

7. Driving a monster truck

8. The women are in an active protagonist role

Sexuality:

1. Promiscuous/ impractical outfits

2. Surfboard innuendoes

3. They have a male boss

4. Strippers pole and stripping

Miriam Hanson's The Female Gaze 1984 :

• A theory that suggests women are also able to sexualise males as erotic objects of desire.
• Since the 1980s there has been a large increase in the sexualisation of the male body.