How Far Will Your Gaze Go?

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For my IML 201 – The Languages of Digital Media class, we had to do an assignment that encouraged multimedia communication through the collaboration of image and text. We had to select 3 images that evoked past, present and future, with the image representing the past being historically important. We then had to transform these images into a triptych of text-images in the style of Barbara Kruger, providing a critique of broader cultural themes or social practices.

I chose the male gaze, more specifically “the gaze”, and its effect on celebrities as my theme for this project. Since paintings most prominent form of image-making, the gaze has been traditionally associated with reducing women to sexual depictions, but I find it interesting how lately men have started to become the subject of the gaze. Even though the male body is now being more objectified in the media, the result of it is still not the same as when women are sexualized. Objectified, the male body is not reduced; it is gazed upon in a powerful way. This is only the beginning of it, though; men have definitely not been objectified as much as women.

The gaze urges viewers to consume more of the same objectified image as it touches on the spectator’s pleasures and desires. Thus, in our capitalist society, the gaze encourages the objectified to allow herself/himself to rely on its profitable marketability. In this way, female stars have been exploited, consumed, and lead to tragic endings as a result of playing by the rules of the gaze. Seeing how the gaze is now starting to embrace the male figure more prominently, will it ever have such drastic effects upon men?

If you are interested, feel free to check out my full statement of purpose for this project where I develop this idea of the gaze and its effect in male stars with an explanation and formal analysis of each segment of my triptych. You can read that and see more images of it HERE.