Has naming the gaze, so often a tool of violence and domination, helped to dismantle it? How does looking back (back at the camera, back in time) give rise to new ways of seeing, or are we held fast by the familiar habits of the twentieth century’s eyes?
It strikes me that in our present moment of hypervisuality and hypervisibility, our ways of seeing (to borrow a turn of phrase from John Berger—more on him later) are dominated by the forms that we have inherited from the twentieth century. The “male gaze,” the “inner eye,” the “oppositional gaze,” hypervisibility—these logics of the gaze and its power are so embedded in our culture that they themselves are subject to recursive representations, the gaze looking back at itself (and back, and back). Even as we navigate the ever-proliferating constellations of state- and self-surveillance that discipline our protest, monitor our speech, and scrape our data (don’t enable the iCloud friends), we are looking backwards to find our answers, calling upon the logics of seeing and surveillance that were developed before these technologies ever existed.
Recently, someone described Foucault’s panopticon as passé in casual conversation. I ought to look at something much more contemporary to our present moment, they suggested, perhaps Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” I looked up the publication date when I got home – three years before I was born, another dispatch from the previous century. “Postscript” is eerily prescient, undoubtedly, but can these twentieth century formations of the gaze truly anticipate what it is to navigate the present? I wonder what Google mined from my search query, itself carefully captured and logged in the version of Martha that traffics outside my field of vision.
We look—gaze, see, surveil, spectate—within frameworks that we can now name and recognize. And yet, as several of our authors here note, the many permutations that these frameworks assert (the male gaze, the female gaze, the straight gaze) have the power to apprehend us in operations of power that seem unavoidable even as they are observable. It produces, to my mind, a particular ambivalence: has naming the gaze, so often a tool of violence and domination, helped to dismantle it? How does looking back (back at the camera, back in time) give rise to new ways of seeing, or are we held fast by the familiar habits of the twentieth century’s eyes? What arises out of the essays assembled in this forum—to my eye, to my gaze—is the double bind of this moment of the “visual” in our culture. As Samuel P. Catlin argues in “Seeing Without Guarantees,” John Berger’s invitation to “un-know ideology” and return to a childlike state where “seeing comes before words” affords us the opportunity to perceive the art-historical framing that overlays our visible worlds, but, in his words, the “subtraction of all guarantees has not grown any less disorienting…or any easier to endure.” Even as we enter into more knowing vision, or a more knowing un-knowingness, the waters only seem to get murkier. Just as naming the gaze does not absent us from its forces, “seeing before words” does not guarantee access to a collectivity that we might, at our most utopian, imagine as the intended end of our gaze.
Across the six essays that make up this forum, our authors navigate the creeping essentialism that can inhabit the gaze, the ways the gaze initiates subjects into the operations of power, as well as its mythologizing force. They ask what it means to experience recognition within the visible operations of the gaze, to push at the edges of what these frames permit and what they cannot imagine. Samual P. Catlin and Amandla Thomas-Johnson each turn to the university for their answers (or lack thereof), articulating the ways the gaze is cultivated or directed within institutions of higher education. Catlin takes up Berger’s particular power in the classroom, suggesting that Berger’s “subtraction of guarantees” subverts discursive identification with images, thrusting students and teachers alike towards the disorienting responsibility for interpretive risk. Thomas-Johnson, on the other hand, shows how the university career fair has come to represent the new ideal of institutions of higher education, no longer a “marketplace of ideas,” now merely a “marketplace.” He argues that the ongoing crackdown on pro-Palestine activism on university campuses reveals the “inner eyes” that students are encouraged to develop towards their own extractive power, and suggests that our collective resistance might nurture new fields of vision, more scrutinizing gazes to cast back towards the university.
For Farah Bakaari, the gaze is felt in the refracted desires of others, known and unknown, and the body rendered public and vulnerable through the frightening, violent, benign surveilling eye of a small town. The slide between being “looked at” and “looked after” tips precariously one way and then the other—how can one make something like a “self” when the script has already been set, when as Bakaari points out, “I am only its avatar.” In their conversation about the male gaze and its legacy, scholar Amy Skjerseth and filmmaker Elizabeth Myles interrogate these reflexive representations, tracking the women who, in the waning years of the last millennium, contested their framing on screen. They suggest these visual objects articulate the struggle for autonomy as with Madonna’s self-conscious performance of celebrity in “Material Girl” (1985) or Bridgett M. Davis’s thematization of the oppositional gaze in Naked Acts (1996). Myles and Skjerseth then turn to contemporary flashpoints for this negotiation of the male gaze—Barbie (2023) and The Substance (2024)—films that Olivia Stowell explores in her discussion of the ill-defined but oft-circulated imaginary of the “female gaze.” What is at stake for Stowell is the essentializing tendency of these categories that do not form an oppositional framework as much as they politely, obliquely confirm the regimes of gender normativity. The female gaze does not offer a way out, Stowell argues, it merely completes an all-too-familiar binary category of gender. The forum concludes with Madeleine Read’s interview with Martin Harries about his forthcoming book, Theater After Film (The University of Chicago Press), on the impact of mass culture and film on theater and performance after World War II. As Harries argues, theater provided a counter to film’s hegemonic, interpolating power, even as the stage and its audiences were undeniably changed by the cultural force of cinema.
There is a tension in each of these essays, a commitment to the deep ambivalence that arises in our attempts to pin down the (a) gaze. After all, as so many here argue, looking to the past turns over more questions than answers, exposing our interpellation (or belief therein) within these ways of seeing and offering only the uncertain, unsteady “subtraction of guarantees” in their stead. And yet—perhaps unsurprisingly—this is where our authors locate the greatest possibility. It is not, they seem to argue, the formation of new organizing frameworks for the gaze that will articulate our paths for resistance; rather, it is the recognition that—in a moment where the gaze is both omnipresent and squarely within view—we ought build our structures of solidarity outside its taxonomical power.
In the closing pages of Ways of Seeing, Berger writes that the norming force of images, particularly in advertising, transform the “entire world [into] a setting for the fulfilment of publicity’s promise of the good life. The world smiles at us. It offers itself to us. And because everywhere is imagined as offering itself to us, everywhere is more or less the same.” It is this sameness—the essentializing gaze, the gaze that transforms meaning-making into market practice with its hegemonic power, or its capacity to transform us into avatars—that these essays strive to resist. We may not be able to evade this force entirely, but perhaps we can refuse the “good life” that it promises. We might, as so many of the authors in this forum suggest, strive to look askance, to look awry, to look again.
Martha Henzy is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan where she researches violence and witness in contemporary literature and visual culture. She has watched Katseye’s MAMA performance every day for the last two months (and you can too!)
Thumbnail photo by Mick Haupt via Unsplash