This is a video lecture by Jordan Schonig, a film studies professor who makes video lectures about film and film theory, cultural studies, and philosophy.
Jordan has an entire video series about film theorist Laura Mulvey and her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, which popularized the term “male gaze”. In this particular video, Jordan flips the switch to look at the concept of the female gaze.
The blurb: “This video looks at only one possible (but ultimately problematic) definition of the female gaze: visual and narrative strategies for sexually objectifying men on screen for the consumption of heterosexual female spectators.”
It defines the female gaze in two ways:
- Visual and narrative strategies for depicting men as sexual objects for consumption by heterosexual female spectators.
- Visual and narrative strategies that represent the visual dimensions of female desire.
The video is an academic one and discusses the gaze with reference to Jacques Lacan and Jean-Paul Sartre. It uses the film Magic Mike XXL as an example
Jordan Schonig the author of The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement (Oxford University Press, 2021)