The Left Gaze

[koganbot]

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Trevor's got an in-depth analysis of the "Gee" video and the male gaze or absence thereof. If I'm interpreting his basic point right, it's that the video is about girls having fun with girls, not about how they appear to some guy — or maybe more emphatically, it's about the girls having fun with girls while abandoning the gaze of some guy. As far as it goes, this analysis seems right, and matches what I think about Miss A's live routine for "Breathe," which is that it's not about some guy making them breathless; rather, the supposed breathlessness is a pretext for the young women* to clown around with each other.

Except I don't think that puts the issue to rest, not by a long shot. What I find limited in Trevor's analysis is that he's talking about the story in the video but he's not talking about the story of the video in the world. For instance, I'm looking at the video. So's Trevor. So are you. I don't see that the video has subtracted our eyes.

An incomplete list of gazes, gazers, etc. that might be relevant:

--The characters in the video
--The performers in the video
--Who the videomakers envision might be looking at the video
--The videomakers themselves (incl. performers, costumers, editors, financiers, etc.)
--The assumptions the videomakers make about the audiences for the video, about the audiences' expectations regarding music etc., audiences' role in fandom and their vision of the world, and about how the audiences are likely to use the video, etc.**
--The experiences and assumptions of the videomakers themselves about video, music, life; their vision of potential worlds etc.
--The actual audiences for the video and how they see such videos; their visions of the world and of potential worlds; how they use the video in their lives
--The people writing about the video; the writers' assumptions and visions etc. and their assumptions about their readers' assumptions and visions etc.
--The social classes/categories of the aforementioned (which obv. include age and gender but include a lot of other stuff too)
--How all these gazes, gazers, uses, etc. may change over time, the use of the video not being fixed

That the girls in the video might be liberated in relation to a fictional guy*** in the video, and his hypothetical employers, doesn't stop some guy — or some gal — who's looking at the video from thinking of them as cute dolls****, if that's what s/he's determined to see. I don't see where the video forestalls this. Of course, the video offers a whole lot of choices as to how to view it, but it's not exactly avoiding sex appeal and prettiness, to be enjoyed, to be emulated, etc.

To be honest, I've long steered clear of analyses that use the term "the male gaze," since my impression was that the people using it were making a lot of stuff up (about audiences, etc.). But I've read so few that this is prejudice on my part, not knowledge. Also, I'm not sure you can do such analyses without speculating a whole hunk of a lot. Even if you undertook mass surveys of music makers, videomakers, and audiences, the surveys aren't likely to tell you what you need to know.**** (Tom would have a better idea than I about this.) So we're inevitably stuck looking at the video itself and trying to glean from that what the world that surrounds the video is like (including worlds of the imagination). Which doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

Since most of the people writing such analyses are liberal-lefties like me, what we write will automatically contain a relation between liberal-lefty writers and a whole bunch of other people (videomakers, music audiences, etc.), many of whom are not liberal-lefties. This relationship can't be erased, even if we leave it unmentioned in our analysis. Not that the class differences between us and the people we're writing about invalidates what we say. (I consider "liberal-lefty" a social class, though that's obviously an assumption that needs further thought and elaboration.)

*Why do I call Girls' Generation girls and Miss A young women? It's not that I think Girls' Generation are less adult than Miss A are. But "girls" is part of their moniker and part of their image, whereas Miss A seem to be projecting something older. I don't know what the actual people in Girls' Generation and Miss A think about their monikers, or how the monikers were chosen (though I wouldn't bet on it being the group members who chose).

**Videos are in the world, hence are part of the world, so expectations about the world would include expectations about videos. But I differentiate for reasons similar to, e.g., the reason I differentiate between my expectations when someone tells a joke beginning "Jesus, Buddah, and Sunny of SNSD walk into a bar" and my expectations and ideas regarding Jesus, Buddah, and Sunny when they're not in a joke. And I have expectations regarding dogs and mailmen when they're in jokes but hardly any knowledge or opinion of the relations between dogs and mailmen when they're not in jokes. As for jokes, so for videos. What I expect from dogs in videos is not the same as what I expect from dogs on the street.

***By the way, I think it's the ex-mannequin girls rather than the employers who are designating the guy Employee Of The Month at the end, as a parting gift. Thanks, you created us, clothed us, now we've gone off to play (but maybe we'll come back and visit, cute guy).

****In America when I was growing up, dolls were marketed to little girls, not to little boys. And in general, dresses on mannequins are marketed to women, not men. Which doesn't take the male gaze out of the picture, by any means. But you've got cultures and groupings doing the creating/gazing here, not just one gender at a time.

*****Not that we can't find things out. E.g., I just did Google searches with the names of K-pop performers followed by the letter "p" to see how Google would suggest finishing the word. I ran super junior, dbsk, big bang, jay park, shinee, snsd, hyuna, t-ara, 2ne1, brown eyed girls. [For Big Bang and Miss A I typed "k-pop" in front of their names.] For all five male acts I got "profile" as the first suggestion, the next three suggestions usually including "poster" and the names of some songs beginning in p, or in the case of jay park, "parents" (plus one more for shinee, which I'll get to later). Three of the female acts (t-ara, miss a, 2ne1) also get "profile" as the first suggestion, the rest of 2ne1's being the names of songs. Snsd and hyuna both get "plastic surgery" as the first hit. "Plastic surgery" is miss a's second hit and t-ara's third. Hyuna's second hit is "pregnant," and her fourth is "photoshoot." And one of the male groups, shinee, gets "plastic surgery" as its third hit. Of course, I don't know the demographics of who does the searching, whether they're more or less the same for each group. 2NE1's fan base is supposedly young (avg. age 15) and female, SNSD's more mixed in age and gender, and my ears say the same when listening to fan chants for T-ara, but none of this has been verified.

Comments

[trevitron.livejournal.com]

I think the key sentence here, for me, is "I don't see where the video forestalls this."

I have a very specific interest in the discourse on the "male gaze" and related concepts, and it's not the typical, orthodox one. I'm as skeptical as you are about the phrase, and I generally don't like using it, though the video so specifically instrumentalizes it that there's really no other phrase to use.

The best thinking in general on this subject, in my opinion, is from Carol J. Clover, who wrote a great book about horror cinema called Men, Women, & Chainsaws. One of her points in the book is that the gaze, especially in horror cinema, goes both ways. There's what we typically mean when we say "male gaze," which even women are invited to adopt at times, and then there's what she calls the reactive or introjective gaze, which describes the way watching horror films have an effect on us and provide a kind of masochistic pleasure. I don't think that applies here in the video for "Gee," but I believe her point that the gaze is always complex and multidirectional is important.

The reason I brought up the sentence about "forestalling" is because it reminds me a lot of something Clover says in her book. She talks a lot about voyeuristic pleasure (which is something that obviously has a lot to do with K-pop in general) and argues that horror movies don't "foreclose" voyeuristic pleasure but they do drive us towards an investment in other forms of pleasure that are not voyeuristic (and that have a lot more to do with taking in something harmful through the gaze).

I think feminist approaches to music videos or cinema can take two routes. The first is involved in determining ways that a work can foreclose or forestall the types of identification and pleasure that are deemed harmful and destructive by feminists. I'm not very interested in this, and this tactic doesn't define me at all as a feminist. The second is accepting that a work can usually never, and perhaps should never, foreclose or forestall so much as it should channel our energy and focus to more productive ends.

It was in line with this second approach that I wrote the piece on the "Gee" video. I totally agree that there's nothing about it that does not, in the end, invite would-be voyeurs from taking pleasure in it in ways that are just as regressive as any others in pop culture. Nor does the disappearance of the employee and the main action mean that SNSD have "conquered" oppression or the male gaze or anything. (And despite the vagueness of the term, I think the general idea of the male gaze is something many women understand intuitively on some level.) But I do think that while all those other, more conventional things remain in place in the video, there is something special about it, which is that, bypassing convention, it does invite the viewer to imagine things differently.

I don't know what the "ideal" feminist music video would look like, but I don't believe it has anything to do with foreclosing/forestalling, more so with producing new possibilities that can coexist along convention. It might be that the insights of the "Gee" video are purely "virtual"—the gaze doesn't disappear, it just shifts to a new site—but that virtuality counts for something, I think, especially because, for me, feminism is most valuable when it deals with pushing us to imagine different ways the world could be.

But I do agree with your point about the multifarious nature of whatever we mean by "the gaze," and I do think that's something that should be explored further.

[koganbot]

Thanks for this comment. I think we're fairly close here. What I'd say, and would expect you to more or less agree with, is that there's nothing inherently wrong or regressive about men gazing at sexy women, voyeuristically or not. And there's nothing inherently wrong or regressive about women being sexy for men to gaze at. The issue is that people are dependent on each other socially and financially, and that this dependence isn't equal. And I'd say there's no way for a particular video — or, for that matter, for a particular relationship (couple or group or whatever) — to cancel out the inequality for itself. But we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater either, get rid of appeal and life altogether and turn the screen blank.

I'd say that there's a slow* but inexorable movement away from "traditionalist" relations towards everyone being legally equal economic actors (so women will get to make contracts in equality with men, ditto for "races," ethnic groups, national origin, sexual preference) but that there's no inexorable movement towards equality in wealth and power. Wealth still begets wealth, and power still begets power, and various entrenched inequalities hold on. And new social groupings appear, with new inequalities. ("Indie," for instance, is a social grouping.)

Btw, a most interesting inequality is the one between performer and fan, one that's fraught with tension. After School's "Bang!" makes this tension explicit: "T-R-Y, Do it now, Can you follow me? Yes! Uh-huh / T-R-Y, Pick it up, You'll never catch me, Oh no." Or 2NE1's self-opposition, "Even if you were me, you'd be envious of my body" (from "I Am The Best") followed one month later by "Just like her I wanna be pretty / I wanna be pretty / Don't lie to my face cause I know / I'm ugly." Such tensions accompany every idol group, no matter what or where, and can't be erased from a video or performance.

*Slow as in over centuries, maybe starting with whatever foreshadowed the Reformation in Europe. Without knowing hardly anything about Korean history, I'd say the process is necessarily more condensed, faster, in Korea, "faster" being a relative term.

[koganbot]

I ran the "p Google" test on 4minute (because of this post) and got "profile," "poster," "plastic surgery," and "pretend lyrics," in that order.