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Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days ( 4, 3, 2 for short) is a classic of the new wave in Romanian cinema. Centred on the paternalistic and patriarchal relationship between political power and women, this analysis reveals the psychological effects of traumatic situations and how unconscious (hidden, often irrational) drives determine human behaviour in subjects living under totalitarianism. This article provides a reading of the film through such concepts as the (male) gaze, the law in relation to the figure of the father and the Lacanian orders of the symbolic and the real, the split personality of the abused woman as both subject and object, and life/death instincts in the face of totalitarian intrusion into the reproductive rights of women. This kind of analysis sheds new light on the nuances of the film and the significance of the silence in it by exposing the symbolic reality of communist totalitarianism as opposed to a seemingly authentic Lacanian real that is hidden in the silence and in the materiality of the female body.

Using male and female gaze theories as frameworks, this article analyzes the visual design and composition of four distinct breastfeeding (BF) photographs posted by Alyssa Milano to her Instagram in order to better understand the public’s mixed responses of support and criticism. I argue that Milano borrows visual elements from the male gaze and combines them with feminine content in an attempt to (1) challenge the dominant, patriarchal norm of deriving pleasure from viewing sexualized women and (2) instead encourage an understanding of the maternal woman as visually pleasing. In turn, Milano’s message supports the normalization of public BF. Milano’s position as firmly entrenched in the male-dominated world of television and film is key: it enables her to speak and promote change from within the system, for external oppositions often remain on the outside, as counterpoint. Using Instagram promotes this as well. Rather than dilute their power, intermingling BF images with those representing the dominant culture may prove more successful for its gradual progression to normalization. The end goal, of course, is to encourage not just acceptance but a sense of pleasure in seeing feminine representations of women, including those focused on aspects of motherhood, like BF.

Feminists have argued that women’s bodies, appearance, and subjectivity are formed through a multitude of regulatory dispositif and disciplinary apparatus. One such disciplinary technique has been “looking”, evidenced in work on the male gaze, disciplinary power, misrecognition, objectification, and indirect social aggression. But there remains a significant gap in the role of women’s looking in subject formation, particularly within the context of a postfeminist sensibility. To address this gap a poststructuralist informed discourse analysis was performed on interviews with 44 white heterosexual British women (aged 18–36). Four discourses deployed by the participants when talking about looking between women were identified. These discourses were as follows: judgemental looking between women is pervasive; judgement is consumption oriented; women’s looks are prioritised over men’s, foregrounding a female gaze; and appearance is the vehicle to recognition. We conclude by highlighting the importance of a postfeminist gaze for understanding women’s subjectivities, and how looking works in a postfeminist context to maintain regulation, anxiety, surveillance, and judgement.

This study critically examines television commercials advertising AXE, a male body spray. Using the framework of male gaze, originally coined by Laura Mulvey, which manipulates the viewer's (and camera's) perspective, this analysis uncovers the ubiquitous myth that exposes such instinctual voyeuristic pleasures. This psychoanalytic investigation goes beyond the descriptive visuals of bikini-clad women; examining the inconspicuous maintenance of a deep-rooted patriarchal structure that silences the female voice. Its intention is to make the biased representations of women in the media a prominent issue, encouraging dialogues and deliberation in the public sphere.

This longitudinal investigation analyzes the manner in which rape myths are conveyed through textual material published in Playboy. Results indicate that Playboy (a) portrays rape as a gender-neutral issue, ignoring patriarchal roots of sexual violence against women, and (b) promulgates ambiguous discourse, which is equally likely to endorse and refute rape myths. Interestingly, readers’ contributions are most often the source of refutations of rape myths. Overall, findings suggest that little progress has been made over time in deconstructing rape myths promulgated to men, as this particular men’s publication has consistently painted a gray picture in which refutations have remained unsuccessful in disempowering rape myths.

This article considers the role of beauty in Costa Rican sex work. In the context of sex tourism, beauty operates as affective labour performed by sex workers, labour that is mediated by deeply contradictory understandings of race and nation. Theorising beauty as a form of affective labour means thinking about beauty as value, as something that circulates, can be exchanged and is ultimately relational. While Costa Rica's national mythology has long focused on claims to white origins, sex tourists identify local women's ‘exoticism’ and non-whiteness as particularly appealing. Commercial sex does not simply depend on an imperial male gaze, but rather requires us to consider how particular national mythologies about race are linked to ideals of attractiveness in complex ways. I also explore how women experience and manage their sexual attractiveness to foreign tourists in their daily lives and work.

This paper will suggest how a psychogeographical methodology can be developed as a new method for feminist psychologists, in the study of urban and rural environments. One of the limitations of situationist psychogeography is its grounding in the male gaze. In addition, men have had privileged access to and time to participate in such activities. Drawing on Feminist geography, Queer theory and Gay/Lesbian writing, core concepts such as embodied subjectivity and heteronormativity can be used to develop the theoretical base of a feminist psychogeographical methodology. In this paper, I will outline how feminist psychogeographical research might be conducted; the ‘situationist’ approach of using bodies as research ‘instruments’ means that innovative data may be gathered through the experience of walking and seeing the world through the situationist lens. Finally, the implications of this work for personal and political social transformation will be addressed.

On September 11, 2010, Ines Sainz, a sports reporter for Mexican television network TV Azteca, was allegedly harassed by members of the New York Jets football team. Controversy erupted around the role of women in sports broadcasting and the myriad attendant dimensions involved, including issues of credibility, dominant beauty ideals, and the male gaze, among others. This study assesses how sports blogs covered the controversy, using a combination of in-depth interviewing and textual analysis of four popular sports blogs. The analysis revealed that the blogs constructed an atmosphere that exposed attitudes of objectification, Sainz’s perceived lack of credibility, and the sexual economy of sports blogs.

This conversation between Laura Mulvey and Roberta Sassatelli offers a historical reconstruction of Mulvey’s work, from her famous essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ to her most recent reflections on male gaze, film technology and visual culture. The conversation initially deals with the socio-cultural context in which the ‘Visual Pleasure...’ essay was produced by outlining a number of possible theoretical parallelisms with other scholars, from Foucault to Barthes to Goffman. Then, on the basis of Mulvey’s latest book, Death 24× a Second, and of a variety of contemporary examples, the emphasis is on the relative shift in Mulvey’s work from gender to time and visual technology. Finally, the conversation focuses on the concept of ‘gendered scopic regime’ and the potential re-articulation of the male gaze through the technological re-direction and control of the visual.

This article examines the representation of under-age girls in the sex trade through a comparative analysis of the social scientific monograph Gangs and Girls: understanding juvenile prostitution and the fictional novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals. Through a semiotic examination of the book covers, and a discursive deconstruction of the fairy-tale conventions of the textual content, the author considers how the 'grown up gaze' is both gratified and sometimes challenged. She further demonstrate that ironically, the fictional account in Lullabies offers a more nuanced consideration of the socio-economic factors that contribute to the abuse and sexual exploitation of children than the expert account in Gangs. The article concludes by suggesting 'grown ups' must be cognizant of the voyeuristic tendencies and the political pitfalls of adult renderings of girl prostitutes. Child prostitution brings together two areas of grave concern: the sexual abuse of children, and the exploitation of child labour. Considering the prevalent reification of childhood innocence, the existence of children involved in the sex trade represents a profound adult failure to ensure the health and safety of one of society's most vulnerable constituencies. Yet, according to scholars who address the issue, the problem has not yet received the proper attention in either academia or the health professions (Brown & Barrett, 2002; Willis & Levy, 2002; Sher, 2011). In response, recent analyses of child prostitution attempt to expose an overlooked and undertheorized area, grappling with the aetiology of, and the antidote to, this social ill. This article considers one such analysis, Gangs and Girls: understanding juvenile prostitution ('Gangs', Dorais & Corriveau, 2009), and compares it with a fictional novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals ('Lullabies', O'Neill, 2006). Written by two social science professors, Gangs aims to elucidate how and why under-age females get lured into prostitution. Written from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl, Lullabies tells the tale of a neglected child who falls into the clutches of a predatory pimp. Both books have received critical acclaim and popular success. Both books provide a context to explain how a pimp can inveigle a vulnerable girl into selling her body, and what conditions are necessary to escape his control. Thus, while the monograph is a normative project and the novel an imaginary creation, the discursive overlaps in between the two Canadian texts belie the division between fact and fiction. Gangs relies on narrative tropes to explicate the under- age female prostitute; Lullabies provides implicit social commentary on the systemic failures that compel the protagonist to participate in the sex trade. Both texts therefore contribute to a construction of knowledge about child prostitution that helps to fill a gap in the existing literature. Yet, in conjunction with raising awareness and theorizing causation, I posit that through their voyeuristic covers and their fairy-tale reasoning, both books gratify what I want to call the 'grown- up gaze'. My notion of a 'grown-up gaze' tweaks the 'male gaze', a concept that feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey catapulted into critical consciousness in 1975. In her essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975), Mulvey deploys a psychoanalytic framework to expose how fictional film caters to the male perspective by exploiting and dehumanizing the female body for patriarchal pleasure. The male perspective is endowed with active authority to construct meaning, and the

This article examines how the global traumas of resource-driven conflicts and acts of terrorism are mapped in 21st-century US and UK narrative cinema, and suggests that guilt, elicited in the implied Western viewer, is displaced in the films onto images of Western women. Revisiting Mulvey’s influential theory of ‘visual pleasure’ through the ‘male gaze’, this article analyses the films Traffic (2000), a depiction of US complicity with global drug cartels, Babel (2006), the story of a global media frenzy surrounding American tourists victimized in Morocco, and three films about crises in Africa: Shooting Dogs (2005), a dramatization of Western apathy during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, The Constant Gardener (2005), about pharmaceutical testing in Kenya, and Lord of War (2005), based upon the life of an arms dealer. A theoretical re-engagement with feminist film theory is followed by analyses of the films to illustrate how the guilt elicited by each of the films’ traumatic contexts conjoins with the primal psychological experience of lack. Viewers’ and their screen surrogates’ combined sense of helplessness in the face of others’ trauma is displaced ‘hysterically’ onto images of women, exposing a troubling new looking relation in our traumatic age.

This article emerges from collaboration with visual artist Janet Hodgson on excavations around Stonehenge. Experiencing Hodgson at work led me to re-examine how archaeologists think about visuality, particularly in criticism of the male gaze. Ideas of the gaze have significantly influenced the directions taken in studies of landscape and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) over the last 15 years. In this article I expand on and develop theoretical debate surrounding the gaze, using Hodgson's practice to illustrate my argument. I argue for a renewed critique of the politics of vision and cartographic method that assimilates recent theoretical developments. I review accounts of the gaze, and discuss recent theories of knowledge as applied to mapping and GIS. I suggest that new theories have the potential to move the gaze critique towards further exploration of the contextual complexities of visualities. I use Hodgson's artistic projects at Stonehenge to illustrate this complexity.

The activity of `pole dancing' has recently been transformed from an act performed exclusively in strip clubs to one currently marketed as a form of aerobic exercise. While much feminist academic work has investigated aspects of the sex industry, such as stripping, very little research has been conducted into this recent social phenomenon of pole dancing as a recreational activity. This study takes a feminist poststructuralist approach to the investigation of this topic through the discursive analysis of talk produced in a range of focus groups and interviews. Participants included instructors at pole dancing studios, pupils regularly attending the studios, one-off pole dancers and general university students (a total of 25 participants; 20 females and five males). Our analysis focuses on the ways in which ideological dilemmas surrounding issues such as empowerment, control and the male gaze are managed within the participants' accounts. Implications of these constructions are discussed in relation to the redefinition/reiteration of hegemonic, patriarchal notions of female sexuality.

The Red Hat Society (RHS) offers midlife and older women a brief, chosen escape from everyday family, paid, and unpaid work duties. Toying with traditional notions of femininity and aging, the women in this study used a campy performance of gender as embodied in the RHS to both rewrite and reproduce traditional gendered scripts. That is, these midlife and older women enacted elaborate and frivolous alternate feminine identities using their RHS membership as a venue. In doing this, RHS members re-appropriated previously diminishing societal attention and recaptured the heterosexist and ageist male gaze. In their research, the authors found that these older women renegotiated and resisted traditional gender roles through self-defined “fun” activities such as going out in public in hyperfeminine dress and engaging in feminine activities such as lunch, tea, and shopping. RHS members are not fading into the woodwork as society expects of aging women, as they publicly take up leisure space, have fun, and engage in personal leisure that only benefits them. This qualitative work, based on research with seventy study participants, twenty-five individual interviews, and four focus groups with forty-five RHS members, suggests that RHS members use the organization as a site of gendered leisure in pursuit of midlife fun.

This article analyzes representations of feminism and sexuality on Suicide Girls (www.suicidegirls.com), a commercial site which features the online journals, profiles and nude photographs of young, heavily tattooed, punk women. It highlights the ways in which this site attempts to subvert the male gaze by changing contemporary photographic practices. It also interrogates the way in which the feminist potential of this site remains constrained by its inclusion of only a limited number of women of colour and only as a marketing `strategy' of diversity. It argues that rather than a critical race feminist commitment to inclusivity and structural change, this strategy of `diversity' is reflective of the internet tenet which holds that `content diversity is good business'. Thus, it concludes that rather than a feminist site which operates in the hope of broadening understandings of female sexuality, this site prioritizes profit to the detriment of feminist content.

This study extends the research on objectification theory by examining the effect of anticipating a male or female gaze on appearance-related concerns in 105 female undergraduates. Gaze anticipation was manipulated by having participants believe they would be interacting with a man or woman before completing several self-report measures. Results demonstrated that anticipating a male gaze produced significantly greater body shame and social physique anxiety than anticipating a female gaze, while no differences were observed for dietary intent. Discussion centers on the pervasiveness of the experience of self-objectification and the implications of these findings for future research.

The aim of this article is to show the way in which film director Josefina Molina dissects the effect traditional education had on Spanish women. In Evening Performance, Molina deconstructs the life of a wife as an individual, while in Most Natural she centres on the family as a social unit. Once both, wife and family, are torn and displayed 'in pieces', the director reconstructs them as a new, hopeful whole. These films study the difficult transition Spanish women had to undergo from a society enchained by a national-Catholic education into contem- porary, European Spain, and from monolithic thinking to plurality. Spanish women were defined as 'wives and mothers' till the 1980s, and it was not easy, either individually or as a group, to reach the status of independent citizen. The Spanish film director Josefina Molina has been instrumental in subverting stereotypes about women in the aftermath of Franco's dic- tatorship. Her films, together with those of Pilar Miro, were a significant change for female audiences. Women's psyche had suffered the devas- tating effects of 40 years of a film industry dedicated to epic and local- colour films, where women were the embodiment of discipline and self-sacrifice to the glory of God and country, or else cheap comedies where the female body was a mere sexual object for the male gaze. Spanish cinema was part of the state apparatus to keep men entertained and under control, and to provide women with the correct and incorrect models of national femininity. It is no exaggeration to say that during the 1950s and the 1960s women were educated in the official social morals and manners primarily through their Sunday visit to the cinema, and that their preferences lay with the Hollywood comedy and the Spanish local-colour film. Thus, few women dared aspire to become

Women's athletics commenced about 60 years after the start of the men's sport. Women's involvement in athletics was held back by the medical and general views that this was a strenuous sport requiring a level of exertion beyond the biological capabilities of female bodies. Their difficult initiation into athletics occurred under male gaze; they encountered opposition from the public, the medical profession and from the male-controlled athletics organizations. A serious participation in athletics requires significant exertion and dedicated training. While the prevailing view was that moderate physical exercise without strain enhanced women's health, the exertion required for athletics was deemed to be potentially dangerous. Within essentialist views of gender, women's involvement in athletics was thought to have implications for their nurturing and domestic roles. When the pioneer women athletes tried to excel, they were said to be straining themselves and their participation in the sport was brought into question. By using theoretical insights drawn mostly from Foucault, training manuals from the early decades of women's athletics and material from interviews with some of the first English female athletes are examined to investigate the attitudes of both genders to women in athletics and to analyse how they circumvented the potential veto of their sport by men.

This article draws on Foucault's concept of the exercise of power and Gramsci's concept of hegemony to examine how women used cosmetic surgery to exercise power over their bodies and lives. The analysis is rooted in two feminist perspectives on cosmetic surgery. The first argues that women who elect to have their bodies surgically altered are victims of false consciousness whose bodies are disciplined by the hegemonic male gaze. The second asserts that women who undergo elective cosmetic surgery exercise free choice in controlling their bodies and lives. By examining sites wherein power is exercised by and over women, the authors argue for a synthesis of these two perspectives. They find that the women achieved greater power and control over their bodies and lives when they embodied hegemonic ideals of feminine beauty. Cosmetic surgery can be empowering for individual women while reinforcing the hegemonic ideals that oppress women as a group.

This article traces the growth of the `fashion for veiling' which has grown in Turkey since the early 1990s, and discusses the representation of Muslim women in both the cultural and public spheres in the late 1980s. The practice of veiling has been chosen to explore how religious iconography is changing to reflect new patterns of consumption and pleasure, and the ways in which these changes are occurring. The authors focus on the shifting meanings of the practice of veiling due to the articulation of Islamic faith into consumption culture, as evidenced in advertising images and commentaries taken from Islamic women's magazines, and fashion catalogues of major Islamic clothing companies. The authors examine the problematic relationship of the fashion for veiling to two other established meanings of veiling: as a sign of adherence to the Islamic principle of covering the female body to conceal it from the male gaze, and as a sign of `political Islam'.

Despite criticisms of the film The Scarlet Letter as engaging in historical revisionism of representations of blighted groups in society, a critical examination of its symbolic language reveals that the film draws on, and circulates, centuries-old Western symbolism and mythology of black sexuality. The article undertakes a review of Western iconography surrounding black sexuality in nineteenth-century Europe and shows how it manifests itself in the interaction of race and sex in contemporary American mythology. The article attempts to show how the iconography of black sexuality undergirds signification of the narrative relationship between the main character and her black servant in the film. The article argues, from the perspective of potential multiaccentual interpolation of the audience, that even a polysemic interpretation (from the hegemonic male gaze or a subversive female gaze) of the text still reveals blackness as a marker of difference and hypersexuality.

Book synopsis: Is heterosexual sex inherently damaging to women? Is it possible for women to enjoy sensuality and pleasure with men that does not increase male power? Lynne Segal's unflinching examination of feminist thinking on sexuality over the past twenty-five years tackles these questions head on. Straightforward and challenging, she invites an exploration of sex in our culture - an exploration that could reverse the traditional male gaze and phallic construction of the heterosexual woman. Only two decades ago, politically aware women often declared themselves both sexual liberationists and feminists - their right to sexual fulfillment symbolized their right to selfhood. However, the most positive women's writing on female sexuality in recent years has come primarily from the lesbian community.Segal addresses the silence of heterosexual feminists on questions of sex and love and notes the shift toward sexual conservatism. She looks at the trends that followed Sixties radicalism: sex as a subversive activity, the "liberated orgasm," sex advice literature, gender uncertainties, Queer politics, antipornography campaigns, the rise of the moral right. The hidden anxieties of male sexuality are also discussed.For both men and women, says Segal, our wildest dreams and worst fears are often projected onto sex. She urges an understanding of how our personal pleasures and pains remain public issues, and how a rethinking of sexual liberation could inspire a truly progressive politics for our time. "It is always another whom we try to reach when we experience desire, it is their physical contact we want - sometimes, any sort of contact will suffice ...and by whom we yearn to feel ourselves desired. It is the very greatest of joys, as I experience it ...simply to know that we are able to desire, maybe even able to love, some other human adult." - from the book.

I was rather flattered to be described as a 'theoretical guerrilla' in Beverley Alcock and Jocelyn Robson's article 'Cagney and Lacey Revisited' (1990). Yet it was clear from this article (and the debate that Alcock and I had within the pages of Spare Rib in 1988) that there has been some misunderstanding about the female gaze argument made in 'Watching the Detectives' (Gamman and Marshment, 1988). Alcock and Robson assert that 'Gamman seems to be saying little more than that it is important to have strong female characters with which to identify' (Alcock and Robson, 1990: 43). This crude reduction completely misrepresents my position which I would like the opportunity to restate within the pages of Feminist Review. My whole point about the female gaze in the context of looking at TV cops Cagney and Lacey was not to claim that these characters were progressive 'heroines' (I use the word 'protagonist' throughout). On the contrary, I suggest that a TV series which emphasizes female friendship and features scripts around some feminist issues such as rape, incest, abortion, pornography, violence against women opens up a space for female spectatorship not adequately addressed by most earlier feminist film criticism which had been influenced by Laura Mulvey's ideas about the male gaze of classic narrative cinema. This might not seem like a very startling insight but, at the time I wrote my piece, like other contributors to The Female Gaze, I found myself in disagreement with 'orthodox' feminist film criticism. The viewing space offered by some moments of Cagney and Lacey seemed to be important to me. Not simply because this series featured the first female buddies I'd ever encountered on television, but because I couldn't find anything that adequately explained my experience of watching them.

Psychological writing, both theoretical and empirical, is assumed to exist free of the social dynamics of the psychologist who produced it. If anything like social power or control is contained within psychological writings, it is presumed to be an acknowledged feature of the experimental design or a manipulated attribute of the subject-participants. However, close analysis of these writings reveals a rarely acknowledged yet elaborate system of power relations. In the present study, discourses of power and empowerment are defined and compared in two different forms of psychological writing. The first form stresses the perspective of the observer, employs the male gaze, is relatively unreflexive, embraces the experimental method and attempts to centralize knowledge among a few while marginalizing a mass of unknowing others. The second form is grounded in women's attempts to voice their own and other women's concerns. It is watchful of men, advocates a decentralization of power, and tries to achieve understanding through dialogue.