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R,S,V,P_ I (1977), by Senga Nengudi, Museum of Modern Art, NYC

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“The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimised …… Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.”(p55)

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“The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimised …… Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.”(p55)

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Living in the framework of the male gaze is absolutely self-loss, and it is easy to be manipulated

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Living in the framework of the male gaze is absolutely self-loss, and it is easy to be manipulated

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Frida Kahlo: I am the person I know best.

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Frida Kahlo: I am the person I know best.

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In the gaze that caters to the male gaze, life and body are not controllable, and they are willing to reduce themselves to an object

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In the gaze that caters to the male gaze, life and body are not controllable, and they are willing to reduce themselves to an object

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Explore women's activism from generations past and present.

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Lily Reich/

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Explore the ways artists from the past century have challenged gender roles and expectations.

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https://www.wob.com/en-gb/books/erika-balsom/feminist-worldmaking-and-the-moving-image/9780262544528?gclid=CjwKCAjwtp2bBhAGEiwAOZZTuD2ffK5XACsT6jRqgJrkh36Z8VJA4ZBkAWi8tqSNRa8EffPXQMRZgxoCLcUQAvD_BwE#NPB9780262544528

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Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image Summary

Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image by Erika Balsom

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Additional information

Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image by Erika Balsom

Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.

This is a new book - be the first to read this copy. With untouched pages and a perfect binding, your brand new copy is ready to be opened for the first time

Customer Reviews - Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image

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Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image Erika Balsom

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Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image Summary Unfortunately we do not have a summary for this item at the moment Additional information Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image by Erika Balsom Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.

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Journal Information

Feminist Studies, first published in 1972, is the oldest continuing scholarly journal in the field of women's studies published in the U.S. Contents of the journal reflect its commitment to publishing an interdisciplinary body of feminist knowledge, in multiple genres (research, criticism, commentaries, creative work), that views the intersection of gender with racial identity, sexual orientation, economic means, geographical location, and physical ability as the touchstone for its intellectual analysis. Whether drawn from the complex past or the shifting present, the work that appears in Feminist Studies addresses social and political issues that intimately and significantly affect women and men in the United States and around the world.

Publisher Information

Founded in 1972, Feminist Studies was the first scholarly journal in women's studies and remains a flagship publication with a record of breaking new ground in the field. Whether drawing from the complex past or the shifting present, the pieces that appear in Feminist Studies raise social and political questions that intimately and significantly affect women and men around the world.

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Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective on JSTOR

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Journal Information Feminist Studies, first published in 1972, is the oldest continuing scholarly journal in the field of women's studies published in the U.S. Contents of the journal reflect its commitment to publishing an interdisciplinary body of feminist knowledge, in multiple genres (research, criticism, commentaries, creative work), that views the intersection of gender with racial identity, sexual orientation, economic means, geographical location, and physical ability as the touchstone for its intellectual analysis.

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"A woman is always accompanied, except when quite alone, and perhaps even then, by her own image of herself. While she is walking across a room or weeping at the death of her father, she cannot avoid envisioning herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she is taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does, because how she appears to others - and particularly how she appears to men - is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life."

Art critic and writer John Berger, who died yesterday aged 90, spoke these words in the second episode of seminal BBC series Ways of Seeing. Together with a shoestring budget, a shared leftist ideology and a sympathy for the burgeoning women's movement, he and director Mike Dibb challenged the elitism of arts programming, encouraged their audience to unpick the meanings of paintings rather than simply revere them, and managed to make Walter Benjamin's ideas about mechanical reproduction digestible in a 30-minute episode. With the series spanning topics including the role of the critic, the way art is constructed for our 'gazes', how it depicts women and possessions, and even the way that advertising works, it remains deeply relevant today.

But it's Berger's discussion of how we look at women which resonates most strongly in our current image-obsessed society. Today, the idea of the male gaze may seem well established, and Berger and his all-male team didn't claim to invent the concept which would later be christened by film critic Laura Mulvey. But this was 1972 - the Sex Discrimination Act was still three years away, contraception wasn't yet covered by the NHS, and it would be almost a decade before women could take out loans in their own names without a male guarantor. And yet, here they were, on one of only three channels on mainstream television, sitting in a group and discussing issues such as agency, empowerment, and their relationships to their own bodies and to men. Of course, not everyone was pleased about it - according to the Guardian, Ways of Seeing was derogatorily compared to Chairman Mao's Little Red Book "for a generation of art students".

"The female nude in Western painting was there to feed an appetite of male sexual desire. She existed to be looked at, posed in such a way that her body was displayed to the eye of the viewer"

The ideas put forward by Berger and Dibb, which were later published in a best-selling book created with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, and Richard Hollis, were simple but radical. The female nude in Western painting - hairless, buxom, invariably with skin as white and unblemished as a pearl - was there to feed an appetite of male sexual desire. She did not have desires of her own. She existed to be looked at, posed in such a way that her body was displayed to the eye of the viewer, there only to be consumed. Of course, there was hypocrisy in this, too - "You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her," wrote Berger, "Put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting 'Vanity,' thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure."

Naturally, the way female bodies were presented culturally as objects to be looked at had an effect on women, on the way they came to see themselves - as a sight, a vision. In the words which opened this article, Berger pins down a feeling which, although perhaps not universal, is familiar to many, many women. It comes with adolescence - maybe the first time a man yells at you from a moving car - and is the sense of living life one step removed, living as your own spectator. You are never yourself, you are yourself as you appear to others. To men, yes, and to the women with whom you are supposed to compete for their attention.

To grow up a woman in a Western patriarchal society is to be constantly analysing and critiquing your own appearance, constantly struggling with the reality of your body and the ideals with which you have been presented, measuring yourself up - not for your own pleasure but for the eyes of men. Like that moment in the first season of Sex and the City, when Carrie reveals that she's performing a version of herself for love interest Mr Big, terrified he will see the real her and his desire will dissipate. "You should see me around him," she explains to Miranda. "I'm not like me. I'm, like, Together Carrie. I wear little outfits: Sexy Carrie and Casual Carrie. Sometimes I catch myself actually posing. It's just - it's exhausting."

In Ways of Seeing 's final episode, Berger discusses how the goddesses of art became the models of contemporary advertising, and suddenly it was no longer only men looking at images of women lustfully. Advertising tells us that buying a product will transform us by showing pictures of those who have already been transformed by it - these are people we should aspire to be like or be with. An image of an underwear model is desired by men and envied by women. "This state of being envied is what constitutes glamour, and publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour," Berger says. "Glamour is supposed to go deeper than looks, but it depends upon them, utterly," he says.

Glamour, envy and the act of looking - these are the foundations on which our current fashion and social media obsession rests. Consider the Victoria's Secret Angels. A fleet of women so beautiful, so primped and preened that the name bestowed on them is otherworldly. The Angels present the ultimate female fantasy, with one donning the multimillion dollar jewel-encrusted 'Fantasy Bra' for her strut down the catwalk - each year held in a different global location. They are living, breathing advertisements, existing for mass consumption - the show, seen by millions of mostly women, is the most watched fashion event in the world. December's event has generated almost 100,000 Instagram posts alone.

"Glamour, envy and the act of looking - these are the foundations on which our current fashion and social media obsession rests"

Together, with their breasts lifted, their faces contoured, their bodies waxed and their hair extended, they present a vision of Western female beauty standards so perfect that it is stunning. The Angels - who depict themselves on social media eating healthily and posting workout videos with the phrase #trainlikeanangel, and who we see undergoing pre-show make-overs in pink satin robes - have been transformed. The implication is that, through the purchase of products, the brand's customers can be transformed too. Bounding down the catwalk, the Angels are less static than the nudes who were passive, coyly regarding their male voyeurs. But the impact remains the same - they exist to incite desire, to embody the ideal.

Of course, this is one brand - the Angels are the tip of an iceberg of imagery which makes its way into our brains via social media, television, runway shows, magazine adverts and many other outlets. The fashion industry is built on selling a female ideal, and the Angels are a strong but not singular example of this. Berger didn't want to put an end to advertising, and he certainly didn't want us to stop looking at classical art - but with his collaborators and a late night TV slot, he helped to kickstart a quiet revolution in the way we view the world around us. He encouraged us to question the images which have been the foundation of our culture. That is a truly worthy legacy - and one we must continue.

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Why we still need John Berger's Ways of Seeing

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"A woman is always accompanied, except when quite alone, and perhaps even then, by her own image of herself. While she is walking across a room or weeping at the death of her father, she cannot avoid envisioning herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she is taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

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Following the amazing success of our original tour of the National Gallery, FEMALE SEXUALITY AND THE MALE GAZE 1, join London Drawing Group as we delve even deeper into this endlessly fascinating, problematic and eye-opening theme. With this new class set in the marble halls of the Tate Britain, follow us on a journey through dissecting a totally different collection of artworks, throwing up new questions and new surprises along the way.

In honour of the late John Berger, for this class we are unpack the TATE collection through discussion and drawing, aiming to question the role of female sexuality in painting through history. Through this session, we will explore the nuance of the naked and the nude, the concept of the 'male gaze', notions of wealth, gender politics and bias in the historical artistic community, as well as some eyebrow-raising representations of women through visual history. With reference to the original episode from the 1970's documentary, "ways of seeing", we will raise questions of how women have been viewed throughout the history of art, and through our collective social consciousness, running from the Seventeenth century through to contemporary female artists, with Berger as our guide.

Through this class we will tackle such diverse themes as female rulers, women's roles in the home and kitchen, the concept of the muse, the historical odds of being a female artist, as well as biblical stories of rape, subjugation and triumphs.

The morning will be made up of a guided tour of the gallery with the afternoon devoted to a curated series of drawing exercises that aim to help you understand and engage with these paintings and stories in new and creative ways.

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Female Sexuality and the Male Gaze II: John Berger and the Art of the Nude

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Female Sexuality and the Male Gaze II: John Berger and the Art of the Nude

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Following the amazing success of our original tour of the National Gallery, FEMALE SEXUALITY AND THE MALE GAZE 1, join London Drawing Group as we delve even deeper into this endlessly fascinating, problematic and eye-opening theme. With this new class set in the marble halls of the Tate Britain, fol

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In most aspects of our lives, we have lived in and been dominated by a mostly male point of view regarding the world. From movies to shows to books, plays, art, and more, our society has made sure to fit itself into this view regardless of whether or not focusing too much on it would cause an unbalance in the general experience of people.

In only seeing the male perspective we completely forget and ignore the female one, which then leads to a lack of understanding and appreciation for the female perspective. This is where the female gaze comes in.

Image Credit: Pexels

The female gaze is a new perspective, and there is not much information about it. This concept is still being explored and defined by the people who are now beginning to study and experiment with it.

When you look up information on the female gaze, most of what you will find are pieces from people who are either studying film, working in the film industry, and film enthusiasts. This is mostly due to the fact that the first time the female gaze was coined was in a 1975 essay titled Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema, written by Laura Mulvey.

Since then, mostly people from the film industry, have slowly been exploring this concept and translating it into visual works of art for others to enjoy.

What is the female gaze?
Essentially, the female gaze is the way that women are portrayed through the eyes of a woman instead of a man. Through the eyes of a woman, women are seen as people with feelings and intelligence. The focus isn't necessarily on what the eye can see but on what the heart can feel.
The female gaze looks to evoke emotions and feelings, focusing on touch, interactions, and atmosphere instead of action and just sexuality. The female gaze looks to balance the man and the woman, making them equals in all areas.

So, the female gaze is not the exact opposite of the male gaze, which focuses on stimulating visual cues, desire, action, logic, sex, ego, and objectification (mainly of women), among other things. Even when female desire is shown and represented, through the female gaze, the character that is being desired by another character (whether principal or secondary) isn't objectified.

As Wit and Folly said in her video essay: when female desire is shown through the female gaze, it doesn't objectify the man (or partner), instead it helps both masculine and feminine energies move effortlessly between being the object and the subject of the desire between the two.

Through the female gaze, the characters are seen as human and relatable, showing both strength and vulnerability.

Image Credit: Pexels

Analyzing the female gaze

Whenever we see people analyzing the female gaze, we almost always see them refer to three points that Laura Mulvey makes in her 1975 essay. These points point out and summarize how the male gaze works and, who and what it affects in film specifically.

The first aspect is the camera, then we have the spectators and the characters in the film. The camera and the audience are second to the characters, which are the ones who primarily create the illusion. But the camera helps by pointing out, or focusing, on what the male gaze usually focuses on, the physical, the action, the logical, and not the emotional or spiritual.

With the help of the camera and the characters, the audience is then shown and put into the perspective of the male gaze. A product of one of many male fantasies shown through different media. As Wit and Folly state, it masculinizes the audience regardless of whether they are men, women, or any other gender.

To balance out the scales, Joey Soloway (previously Jill Soloway), recreated the three basic principles that contributed to the male gaze in movies, to fit and describe the female gaze.

The first principle is the Feeling Seeing. When explaining this principle Soloway describes that it is a way to get inside the protagonist. Meaning that, by making the camera subjective, they use the frame to invoke a feeling of in-feeling, rather than looking at the character.

In simpler terms, the camera makes the audience feel what the characters are feeling. Reclaiming the female body and using it to fuse mind, body, and feelings as a tool to invoke these sensations to the audience.

The second principle Soloway called it The Gazed Gaze. In this part, the components of the story convey to the audience what it feels to be the object of the gaze. What it feels to be seen, to be looked at, to be the object of actions, emotions, situations. And, what it feels like to have to live with the consequences of being the object of the gaze.

The final principle is Returning the Gaze. Here, the one who used to be the object says 'I see you seeing me and I don't want to be the object anymore, I want to be the subject so that I can make you the object'.

In a sense, the elements of the story make the audience feel like they are the ones being gazed at as if they are the objects themselves.

Or, as Wit and Folly put it, to switch the roles of the characters and audience equally between object and subject of desire and the gaze.

Image Credit: Center for Health Progress

Masculinizing vs feminizing the audience

While neither the female nor male gaze is a fixed perspective, there are things that happen whenever the audience sits down to consume a work of art in either of these points of view.

When the audience consumes a male gaze-centered story, the perspective masculinizes the audience. That is, it gives the audience masculine characteristics. In the case of the male gaze, the masculine characteristics include those of making the audience think of the woman as an object no matter the gender of the person consuming the work.

Think about the women you have encountered that say things like "women need to serve men to make them happy" or "you should always look good for your man". This type of thinking is partly created and reinforced by works of art that are from the male gaze.

With the female gaze, however, the audience is feminized. Meaning that the audience is made to feel the desires of the women. These female desires include wanting to make the audience know how women really feel to leveling the playing field on every aspect of life between men and women.

So, the female gaze aims more to bring awareness, consciousness, and balance. Whereas the male gaze, up to this point, aims to keep the masculine on top and make everything else seem lesser. As well as diminishing and objectifying in many cases.

As the female gaze is explored and experienced progressively, there will be more elements added to it that will help it be better defined. And, to encompass every aspect of what it means to be feminine to different women.

Until then, we encourage you to look deeper and explore what is the female gaze and what does it mean to be feminine. Maybe you too and add to the emerging discussion about perspectives in the arts.

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diary written by blogger and writer Daila Ayala

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The Female Gaze: Simply, What Is It? | by Daila Ayala | Sociomix

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In most aspects of our lives, we have lived in and been dominated by a mostly male point of view regarding the world. From movies to shows to books, plays, art, and more, our society has made sure to fit itself into this view regardless of whether or not focusing too much on it would cause an unbalance in the general experience of people.

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For six long hours, performance artist Marina Abramovic put her life and body completely in the hands of strangers, turning herself into an object to be used as one wished. During this time she agreed to remain completely passive until the experiment was over. For the audience, there were no immediate consequences. What do you think happened?

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you left your fate completely in the hands of strangers? What if you lost your ability to decide for yourself, and even worse, what if you lost your ability to say "no" altogether? To a greater or lesser degree, many of us do this every day without realizing. We care so much more what strangers think that we tend to be more courteous, caring and polite to people we barely know, than we are to the people we claim to love. We care so much about strangers that we change the way we talk and dress just so they won't judge us. We let strangers tell us what we can and can't do, what we're capable of achieving, and worst of all, we do it without batting an eye. But what if we took this example to it's ultimate extreme?

In 1979 Marina Abramovic, an as yet unknown performance artist living in Soviet Russia, created one of the most controversial, fascinating, and dangerous performance pieces in art history. She called it Rhythm 0, and it was as much a work of daring contemporary art as it was a massive social experiment that pulled the veil on human nature, and laid bare the consequences of leaving ourselves, our bodies and our lives in the hands of strangers.

A variety of objects were placed on the table to be used as one wished. Roses, feathers, chains and even a gun. It was as much a work of daring contemporary art as it was a massive social experiment that showed us the terrifying consequences of leaving ourselves, our bodies and our lives in the hands of strangers.

During the performance Abramovic became willfully passive, turning herself into a living object for the sake of art. She decided that she would stand quietly in the gallery for six hours, during which time audience members were invited to use one of 72 objects on a table in the room to interact with her. The objects ranged from feathers, chocolate cake, olive oil and roses, to a knife, a pair of scissors, a gun, some bullets and chains. The instructions on the table read: Performance. I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility. Duration: 6 hours.

For six hours, she put her life and body completely in the hands of strangers, turning herself into an object to be used, as one wished. During this time she agreed to remain passive, and unresponsive until the experiment was over. Abramovic decided that she would just quietly and limply observe. For the audience, there were no immediate consequences. What do you think happened?

"In the beginning the public was really very much playing with me," remembers the artist. They were gentle, placing a rose in her hand, kissing her and feeding her cake. But then, "it became more and more wild" as the public became increasingly aggressive. "It was 6 hours of real horror," says Abramovic solemnly, "They would cut my clothes, they would cut me with a knife close to my neck, drink my blood and put a plaster over the wound. They would carry me around half naked put me on the table and stab the knife between my legs into the wood."

A night at the gallery quickly turned into a horror show. They took the scissors off the table and cut off all her clothes, one man tried to rape her, another loaded the pistol with the bullet and pointed it at her head, another still cut the skin on her neck and drank her blood.

They took the scissors off the table and cut off all her clothes, one man tried to rape her, another loaded the pistol with the bullet and pointed it at her head. A night at the gallery turned into a horror show. "It was a really difficult piece," she explains, "because I just stood there in front of the table" while the public continued their assault.

Anyone who knew the artist could have predicted how far the performance might go. Marina was known to be completely committed to her craft. So committed, in fact, that she would have let audience members take her life if it ever got to that point. "There was a pistol with one bullet, so basically if the audience wanted to put the bullet in the pistol they could kill me. And I really wanted to take this risk, I wanted to know what the public is about, and what they are going to do in this kind of situation."

"After 6 hours, which was like 2 in the morning, the gallerists came and announced that the performance was over. I started moving and start being myself, because until then I was there like a puppet just for them, and at that moment everybody ran away. People could not confront me as a person."

But after the six hours was up, the moment Abramovic went from passive object to active agent again, the audience was horrified to remember that they had been dealing with a human being all along. They could not confront the traces of torture they left on her body, they could not face their own horrific actions. As she walked towards them dripping with blood and tears, they all ran from her.

These were regular people who probably set out to see a work of art that evening, but ended up torturing the artist. The moment she went from passive object to active agent, the audience was horrified to remember that they had been dealing with a human being all along. They could not confront the traces of torture they left behind on her body, as she walked towards them dripping with blood and tears.

After it was all over, Abramovic had this to say after the performance: "What I learned was that... if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you...I felt really violated." It is a terrifying yet fascinating lesson in the consequences of passivity.

It is difficult to talk about Rhythm 0 without considering the impact Abramovic's gender had on the outcome. For all of written history, and probably much longer than that, femininity was defined in opposition to what it was not. It was not strength, it was not stability, it was frail, delicate and changeable. "Girls can never do anything," said Margaret Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, "Men can ride about the countryside and do things. Girls have to sit and wait for things to happen." Passivity, they used to say, was woman's most charming quality, and in many parts of the world passivity remains a primary characteristic men search for in a partner.

Critics have observed that this kind of extreme passivity, paradoxically, can be seen as aggressive, since it is frustrating to audiences. They argued that observers could not psychologically deal with the removal of all boundaries separating the body from the public space. Some reacted by punishing the artist for her stubborn silence as their expectations about appropriate human reactions were systematically shot down, while others stood on guard and acted as her surrogate will, creating boundaries, wiping away her tears, and generally making sure things didn't get out of hand. An interesting argument, but one that comes uncomfortably close to victim blaming. After all, the only thing the artist was truly guilty of is just standing there. Ultimately, the gallery attendees had full agency over their actions, and if they were feeling frustrated by Marina's extreme passivity, they could have simply walked away.

Meaning is created by each individual in real-time - a woman standing silently in a gallery could just as easily be seen as calmly meditating, as she can be aggressively silent. It is the viewer who decides who she is, and that meaning has absolutely nothing to do with the woman herself. Or as author Jarod Kintz put it in his book I Love Blue Ribbon Coffee: "I drank the coffee because I was tired. I also drank the coffee because I was dominant, and it was passive and put up no fight."

It is clear that under no condition should a performance piece like Rhythm 0 ever be repeated again. If it wasn't for a handful of vigilant civilian guardians, the artist may not have survived that night. If the point of Rhythm 0 was to hold up a mirror to the darker corners of human nature, then the performance piece was a huge success. Not only did it reveal the true price of passivity, it hinted at what submissive women might really be up against when they leave themselves in the hands of strangers.

In 1965 at Carnegie Hall in New York City, a full decade before Abramovic's performance, Yoko Ono performed a similar artistic experiment called "Cut Piece." She sat onstage with a pair of scissors, and the audience was invited onstage to cut a piece of her dress. Eventually she stood there with nothing but shreds. But this had none of Rhythm 0's violence. Somehow, by inviting viewers to cut her dress, intentionally or not, she was placing firm boundaries on what they could and could not do. They could cut. And nothing else. It is only in the case when all boundaries disappear completely that all hell breaks loose.

If the point of Rhythm 0 was to hold up a mirror to the darker corners of human nature, then the performance piece was a huge success. Not only did it reveal the true price of passivity, it hinted at what submissive women might really be up against.

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The Most Terrifying Work of Art in History Reveals The True Cost of Passive Acceptance

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For six long hours, performance artist Marina Abramovic put her life and body completely in the hands of strangers, turning herself into an object to be used as one wished. During this time she agreed