As a filmmaker, I don’t feel like I can separate my identities from the work I make. But I also don’t always think about female/Black/queer gazes when I’m making.
The following conversation has been edited for clarity.
Nostalgia for the 1990s has gained ground in recent years, including grunge fashion and alternative rock music. However, 1990s aesthetics also remind us of the prevalence of diet culture and bodily ideals, especially for women. Music videos and films of the 1990s often framed women’s bodies as objects for the “male gaze,” a concept that was popularized in scholarship by Laura Mulvey. Mulvey’s 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” argues that cinema positions women’s bodies as objects “to-be-looked-at” in a cinematic lexicon that also undergirds patriarchal views of women. Beyond cinema, the term has been discussed in gender and sexuality studies, mainstream culture, and more. Still today, there is an open question as to whether or not women and gender minorities can resist the male gaze in entertainment media—an industry that, as films like Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2023) show, has yet to evade the gaze—be it male, heteronormative, white, or not.
What follows is an edited transcript of a Zoom conversation with Elizabeth Myles, a filmmaker who thinks a lot about the gaze in her work. We compare two media objects that are somewhat contemporaneous (and both directed by women) but also differ significantly. Elizabeth had just seen the film Naked Acts (1996, dir. Bridgett M. Davis), and that week I taught Madonna’s “Material Girl” music video (1985, dir. Mary Lambert, a filmmaker who mainly works in the horror genre). From the 1980s and 1990s respectively, these works come decades after Mulvey’s essay, and yet they still questioned the male gaze, much like films such as The Substance (2024, dir. Coralie Fargeat) do today. In focusing on the male gaze as a historical construct, we question its usefulness for critics in the contemporary context. Our conversation asks how much the gaze is structured in media versus being activated by spectators with varied life experiences. Ultimately, we encourage critics to analyze multiple types of gazes from both ends of production and reception, and in the muddy middle between them.
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Amy Skjerseth: One of the major examples of the male gaze in popular culture is Madonna’s music video for “Material Girl” (1985). In the video, Madonna dresses up like Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, dir. Howard Hawks) and dances with a gaggle of chorus men. But she opens the music video in a strange way, with two men who watch her onscreen in a movie theater. This feels like a commentary on what was, at the time, a lot of men’s desire for Madonna as a sex object. These men say things like, “Oh, she’s perfect! Don’t change a thing. Oh, I’d love to meet her.” Then the video progresses as a quasi-romance that unfolds between her and this industry man.
Elizabeth Myles: That reminds me of how Bridgett M. Davis’s film Naked Acts (1996) begins, which was recently screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. The film opens on protagonist Cece perusing shelves in her mom’s video store after having lost significant weight, a detail that several characters fixate on as Cece navigates an unfamiliar iteration of the male gaze in her new skin. When Cece puts a tape in the VCR player, we’re transported to see a younger Cece play dress up next to former Blaxploitation star and mom, Lydia Love, as she gets ready to film a scene where she takes her clothes off. When her mom leaves, the man that’s entrusted to watch Cece sexually abuses her. Despite Lydia Love’s presentation as a sex object, the film juxtaposes this performative act with Cece’s top falling to the floor during her assault. The choice, or lack thereof, to take off one’s clothes serves a narrative function in the film, rather than purely for visual pleasure. Following this inciting incident, we watch the film through adult Cece’s eyes as she actively chooses not to take her clothes off in pursuit of becoming an actress.
Amy: When women put themselves on a screen within a screen, it is often a self-reflexive move that allows women to critique the male gaze. They control their address in a similar way to bell hooks’ “oppositional gaze,” a term that describes how Black female spectators can critique how they are stereotypically framed. When Black female spectators frame themselves in this way, inside a gaze they set themselves up, they present the option for viewers to reflect on the construction of a film’s gaze. But they also use the oppositional gaze to affirm Black experiences not often portrayed in film. In Naked Acts, the opening setting of the video store seems like such a curatorial choice.
Elizabeth: Exactly. Davis takes self-reflexivity further with the meta film sets and a photography studio within the plot, which provides another layer of lenses through which viewers can engage with the male gaze. Cece is cast in an art film written and directed by men and receives constant pushback about her boundary to stay clothed. Through that project, Cece meets Diana, the owner of a photography studio and one of the only characters who seems invested in supporting Cece’s emotional and spiritual growth. At the end of the film, Diana gives Cece the keys to her studio, where she takes nude self-portraits by herself and for herself. In choosing to take off her clothes in a setting devoid of anyone else’s gaze, Cece is able to express a fullness of her identity and experiences as a Black woman that operates outside of the male gaze she was fighting against.
Amy: I would love to ask what you think this film says about the male gaze. Mulvey’s essay was from 1973, and this film is from 1996, 23 years later. If we’re trying to think about the male gaze in the traditional sense, in the way it’s taught in film or gender and sexuality programs, how far is this film from that concept of the male gaze? Do you think it is consciously commenting on this gaze or perhaps presenting an alternate version?
Elizabeth: Cece actively pushes against Mulvey’s conception of the male gaze by refusing to take her clothes off unless it’s under her terms. There are moments when the film toggles that line, though: for example, Cece is intimately involved with the director of the art film, played by Ron Cephas Jones. Although she enforces her boundary to keep her clothes on and even dictates that he take his off, the power dynamics between them are nevertheless active as Cece navigates which spaces are safe for her to be vulnerable in. She eventually takes her clothes off with Joel, but is later betrayed on set after she finds out that her character is expected to be naked in the film after all.
Since the film is framed as being from Cece’s point of view, Naked Acts challenges the viewer to not only identify with Cece, but also to share in her struggle for bodily autonomy as others constantly attempt to pin her as an object to derive pleasure from. It feels more like a commentary on the male gaze than operating within the constraints of the male gaze. Through this lens, Davis unlocks opportunities for other gazes to come out. I think it’s also a question of what gaze viewers will identify with and if it’s possible for viewers to separate from the male gaze that Cece actively struggles against.
Amy: From what you are saying, the male gaze is not always easy to track, especially when interpreting women’s agency in films. When spectators are asked to occupy blurred middle ground, films open up the potential for contradictory interpretations of certain gendered actions. By asking more questions than they answer, independent films often shift the onus of interpreting the male gaze—or other kinds of gazes—onto the viewer.
Elizabeth: I think the beauty of this film is in these contradictory spaces. Deciding to take off her clothes doesn’t render Cece a powerless object of the male gaze. Cece is constantly fighting against the active/male and passive/female framework of Mulvey’s male gaze. Not only does she refute those roles, she also actively looks back at others, negating what others want her to do with her body and creatively playing with her position to leverage what she wants. When she gets catcalled on the street, Cece turns the power dynamics on its head and throws their sexual comments back at them, which sends the men speeding off. In not allowing others to objectify her, Cece engages her own lens with which to view the world, which feels distinctly like bell hooks’ oppositional gaze.
Amy: Years before bell hooks wrote about the oppositional gaze, Madonna takes on the male gaze on different terms; on the one hand, she frames herself self-consciously, trying to figure out her representation as a pop (and queer) icon—something that necessarily exceeds the male gaze. Here, as in Naked Acts, the male gaze, as a straightforward position that disempowers its subject, fails to capture the questions opened up by Madonna’s performance in the video, which occupies not quite as muddied a middle ground as Naked Acts does, but lands somewhere between courting male gazes and potentially other gazes (the queer gaze especially). On the other hand, by feeding into the male gaze, she frames herself as a product; music videos, after all, are a product to advertise her. Famously, in an interview with David Letterman in 1994, Madonna calls out Letterman for sexualizing her when he incessantly discusses her sex life on his show. That’s in 1994, around the same time as Naked Acts. Even though that film is independent and Madonna is mainstream, these artworks mark a moment in the nineties when women contest their framing by the male gaze. Madonna at once plays into packaging herself for the male gaze–which she perhaps must do as a prominent celebrity–but also makes that conscious framing playful, though not to the same powerful political extent as Naked Acts. Madonna is able to dance in and out of the male gaze, even if she’s not actively opposing it.
Sometimes when I talk about the male gaze, female gaze, etc., I cringe to myself in some ways, because the language is so binary, so gendered. But maybe that was Mulvey’s point. Because then we can ask things such as, does Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2023) only reinforce the male gaze in its three-act structure, which alternates “female gaze” (Barbieland) / “male gaze” ( Kendom) / “female gaze” (Barbieland)? Barbie seems stuck in a male/female binary, rarely able to occupy a third space. The film does offer a few opportunities for a queer gaze, but in a troubling way: queer characters like Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) and Allan (Michael Cera) are labeled as social misfits because they occupy spaces away from gender binaries. The film’s adherence to the gender binary seems to date Barbie back to second wave feminism rather than 2023. What do film directors today do with the male gaze embedded within Hollywood structures, especially when Greta Gerwig needed Mattel’s approval of the film? Even from within commercial and thus more traditional forms of gender representation, Gerwig could have taken several opportunities to play with other kinds of gazes. The same year Barbie debuted, Lauren Michele Jackson, in a New Yorker article, identified several other forms of the gaze, including the white gaze, the heterosexual gaze, and several other identity categories.
Elizabeth: Only so much is possible under the constraints of the male gaze. As a viewer, it makes it that much more exciting when I see media that can push back on this binary idea of gender presentation. The male gaze in Naked Acts asks Cece to perform a two-dimensional version of a Black woman–one that satisfies the desires of male characters, and viewers, by extension. Cece plays with Mulvey’s “to-be-looked-at”-ness inherent to female bodies under the male gaze in a couple ways that stand out to me, from the way that Cece plays with her gender representation through her hairstyles to how she reflexively engages with lenses throughout the film. From the variety of wigs Cece dons to the final scene where she styles her hair in an afro, Davis uses hair to play with Cece’s gender presentation. Her womanhood isn’t static, it’s ever changing, as is her conception of herself outside the constraints of male desire.
In Naked Acts, the presence of lenses not only frames Cece’s relationships but is used as a jumping
off point for her healing and growth. In the opening and closing scenes, we hear Cece dictate letters to her mom via voiceovers. Cece’s relationship with her mother is riddled with the presence of male desire and its many iterations, from objectification to abuse. At the end of the film, as Cece takes nude self portraits in Diana’s studio, we hear in her dictated letter that she’s decided to share the portraits with her mom. The opening and closing scenes mirror each other and offer a before and after look at a mother and daughter’s relationship that finally breaks free from the gazes that tried to box them in.
Amy: Isn’t that similar to the oppositional gaze, giving spectators the tools from within the text to negotiate their own spectatorship? For example, when Miriam Hansen discusses 1920s film star Rudolph Valentino and his female spectators, she argues that women can explore social and sexual relationships outside of patriarchal bounds. Do self-reflexive texts, which use vocabulary and sensory data that invite audiences in on their gazed framing, help us figure out where and how the gaze is directed, and who is addressed by the gaze? Spectatorship is always multidimensional: audiences read films through their particular ways of seeing the world. Given this, how much of the work of “male gaze” is being done by the film or the text, and how much is being done by the spectator? I think what we’re doing here is saying it’s not enough to take the male gaze as a static concept that operates within films. Instead, we’re suggesting that the gaze is taken up actively by audience members, such that the gaze cannot be contained by films but exceeds them. At the same time, the gaze was also actively structured by its makers. How a film’s structured gaze resonates with each spectator depends on the spectator’s background, beliefs, and more–on how they meet the film.
Elizabeth: It really depends on the spectator, their own experiences, and how deep they’re willing to go with a text. And it also departs from the onus of the filmmakers. Once they make a film, it’s out there for any interpretation, no matter what their intentions were.
Amy: In this way, the male gaze is not a big, overarching umbrella concept. It’s a certain way of meeting a text. And it’s partially produced by a text. The gaze lies on a sliding scale between the context of the film and how it presents to varied spectators. If Mulvey says the gaze is about the film’s vocabulary reflecting patriarchy, we’re saying the gaze also encompasses and is determined by how the viewer interacts with patriarchy, or, for other gazes, another form of systemic oppression.
Elizabeth: The gaze seems to be about the relationship between the cinematic language of a film and what it’s trying to do. Oftentimes, these exist in tension, since a film can say one thing while the characters do another, making certain choices and actions. But then, if the visual language still objectifies them in a way that aligns with Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze, it could undermine them. I think the power that certain media have is working within the oppressive system that you’re a part of and trying to figure out what is possible in that space. I think that identifying this throughline is what makes movies such as Jennifer’s Body (dir. Karyn Kusama, 2009) and Bottoms (dir. Emma Seligman, 2023) possible, where they not only recognize the power that the male gaze historically has in cinema as a medium, but overtly challenge who has control of the narrative.
Amy: I think the question of the relevance of the male gaze is this: as long as we still have things that are “to-be-looked-at,” there will still be a gaze. It exists as long as there’s an object and a framing being done.
Elizabeth: So every object that’s made to be looked at still operates within the system, whether they intend to or not?
Amy: Texts have their own legs–they are authored and have their context, but then they also have interpretation outside of it by vastly different people.
Elizabeth: I think the question becomes, how much autonomy can you have in this system? For the Madonna video, if we asked a hundred people about the male gaze it would depend on the person. Some might say, “Well, yeah, she has power, because they’re all feeding out of her hands,” but then another person might claim, “She’s selling herself and her image.” It’s hard to say how much of that Madonna was playing into because she wanted to, versus for sales.
Amy: If we bring in Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, the gaze is an orientation, a perspective that’s directed. A text can direct us up to a certain point before the actor takes over, or before the systemic, archetypal, or narrative way of viewing their character takes over. Then, the viewer has either an aligned or completely unaligned system of viewing the text’s world. Their gaze is directed and can be bent in all sorts of ways, which is why we can have several kinds of gazes like Jackson mentions.
Elizabeth: The question for me as a viewer becomes less about the existence of the gaze and more about accessibility for different kinds of gazes. I wish I’d seen Naked Acts earlier because films like these make a difference in how I see myself in films. Identity can feel muddled when there are systemically fewer characters you can identify with.
As a filmmaker, I don’t feel like I can separate my identities from the work I make. But I also don’t always think about female/Black/queer gazes when I’m making. Not to wax poetic about film form, but that’s where my interest in the medium lies—the attention to composing every frame is what I’m interested in playing with. There’s the hope that people pick up on these choices, the form that contributes to what it is I’m “saying,” but à la Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation (1966), how I say and show my work often holds more significance to me than the idea or concept I’m getting at. This becomes more relevant with my experimental animations, as I don’t expect viewers to understand the exact idea that catapulted into a collage animation or a rotoscoped shape that dances across the screen. Whether or not people “get” it (or if there’s an “it” to get) matters less to me than my ability to play with form. As a maker and a viewer, my love for film lies in the freedom that exists in playing within and outside of stereotypical norms in film. If that’s not oppositional, I don’t know what is.
Amy Skjerseth is Assistant Professor of Popular Music at the University of California, Riverside. Trained as both a classical oboist and a film scholar, Dr. Skjerseth is interested in the tensions between mainstream and periphery, sound and image, theory and practice, and more. She is writing two books, Instrumental Presets: The Visible History of Music Technology (under contract with University of California Press) and The Feminist Wall of Sound. She enjoys running public-facing conferences like Tay Day: Liverpool’s Version as much as she enjoys taking sunset hikes.
Elizabeth Myles is interested in uncovering interior spaces and explorations of Blackness primarily through moving image work driven by the possibility of freedom within structured repetitive acts. Her film and experimental animation work are also informed by her classical cello, printmaking, and (new!) banjo practices. She is based on the South Side of Chicago.
Thumbnail Photo: Film Fun (1922) via-Internet-Archive