161. Disrupting the Male Gaze in Art: Who Gets to Be Seen?

The Male Gaze in Art: Who Gets to Be Seen?

In this episode of The Modern Creative Woman, Dr. Amy Backos explores the concept of the male gaze, its origins in art and film, and how it continues to shape what we see in museums, movies, and visual culture today. From feminist film theory to museum curation, this conversation invites listeners to look more critically at the images surrounding them and consider whose stories are being told—and whose are being left out.

In This Episode

What Is the Male Gaze?

The male gaze is a concept that emerged from feminist film theory and describes the tendency to depict women from a heterosexual male perspective. In this framework, women are often portrayed as objects to be looked at rather than fully realized subjects with agency and complexity.

Amy discusses how this lens extends beyond film and appears throughout visual art, literature, advertising, and popular culture.

The Origins of the Concept

The episode traces the development of the male gaze through several influential thinkers:

• John Berger and his groundbreaking book and BBC series Ways of Seeing
• Laura Mulvey and her seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
• The psychoanalytic influences of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud
• How ideas about looking, being looked at, and power shape our experience of art

Museums, Curation, and Visibility

The conversation expands beyond artists themselves to examine who decides what art is displayed.

Questions explored include:

• Who curates museum collections?
• Whose work gets purchased and exhibited?
• How do institutional decisions reinforce existing power structures?
• What voices and perspectives are still underrepresented?

Amy reflects on her own art education and the overwhelming dominance of male artists in textbooks, galleries, and museum collections.

Women Artists Who Offered a Different Perspective

The episode highlights women artists whose work challenged dominant ways of seeing and centered women's lived experiences.

Featured artists include:

• Mary Cassatt
• Berthe Morisot
• Marie Bracquemond
• Elaine de Kooning
• Lee Krasner
• Joan Mitchell

Amy discusses how these artists created work outside the traditional framework of the male gaze and contributed important perspectives to art history.

The Guerrilla Girls and Art World Activism

The episode also explores the work of the feminist activist collective Guerrilla Girls.

Topics include:

• Their anonymous advocacy against sexism and racism in the art world
• Their iconic gorilla masks and public campaigns
• Ongoing disparities in museum representation
• Why statistics around gender and racial representation in major museum collections remain troubling decades later

Why Representation Matters

Art does more than decorate walls. It shapes identity, belonging, and how we understand ourselves and others.

Amy discusses:

• The health benefits of engaging with arts and culture
• The importance of seeing diverse experiences represented
• How representation influences our sense of connection and community
• Why expanding the stories we encounter through art matters for everyone

Supporting Artists in Your Community

The episode concludes with practical ways listeners can support the arts:

• Visit local open studios
• Attend community art events
• Purchase artwork directly from artists
• Give art as gifts
• Become a museum member
• Buy books by artists and art historians
• Learn about women artists, artists of color, and underrepresented voices
• Support local creative economies

Key Takeaways

• The male gaze is a powerful framework for understanding how women have historically been represented in visual culture.
• Museums and cultural institutions play a significant role in shaping what art we see.
• Women artists have long offered alternative ways of seeing the world.
• Representation in the arts remains uneven despite decades of advocacy.
• Supporting local artists creates meaningful benefits for individuals, communities, and culture as a whole.
• Art can be both personally enriching and socially transformative.

Mentioned in This Episode

• Ways of Seeing
• John Berger
• Laura Mulvey
• Jacques Lacan
• Sigmund Freud
• World Health Organization
• Episode 160: Art and Desire

Questions for Reflection

• How has the male gaze shaped the art and media you consume?
• Which women artists have influenced the way you see the world?
• What museums, galleries, or community arts organizations in your area are amplifying diverse voices?
• How might you support artists and creative communities locally this month?

Connect with Dr. Amy Backos

Follow Amy on Instagram and join The Modern Creative Woman community for more conversations at the intersection of creativity, psychology, art, and women's lives.

Transcript

What about the male gaze? You've likely heard this phrase used in a variety of contexts, and today we're going to explore the origins. Guess what? It's related to art. It's a feminist concept around film, and it was widely popularized in the 70s as a way to understand the art that we see in a museum, especially figurative art. Welcome into the Modern Creative Woman's Podcast. I'm so excited that you're here. And today we are taking a deep dive into this old lens that many artists use in deciding how to paint their figures. It's also used by people who are curating art collections. And we're going to talk about the ways that this particular lens is being disrupted, because it's not especially helpful. So let's get into it. Let's get this started. 

I'm so glad you're here today, and we are taking a dive into feminist film theory, and how we came to understand that there is a very particular lens that most of us have used for most of our lives when looking at artwork. And I remember being in my undergraduate education, I studied psychology and studio art, and we looked at mostly male artists. The textbooks were mostly male artists when we went on field trips. Guess who was in the museum's male artists? So it's more than just what the artists are conveying. It is how art is curated. So the male gaze originated really in feminist film theory. And it's describing the tendency in all kinds of visual arts and in literature that's depicting women and the world from a masculine, heterosexual perspective. And when the male gaze is applied, it's reducing women to a passive object in the painting or in the literature. It's often a passive sexual object, and it's often for the pleasure of the male viewer, maybe always for the pleasure of a male viewer. It was coined originally by John Berger. And he was an art critic. And I first heard about this concept in a skateboard magazine. I was reading an article in Thrasher magazine about a group of women skaters, and they talked about the male gaze in skateboarding and their experience of being perceived as not the athlete that they were. They're just a spectator. And I thought, that's such an interesting word. This is a long time ago. And then I found out the origin, John Berger, he did a BBC television series and also a book. It's called Ways of Seeing. And you can find each episode on YouTube if you want to have a look at it. He's analysing how women were traditionally portrayed specifically in European oil paintings. So he took us on this journey. The video series is incredibly insightful. He identified the lens from which people were painting and the art was being selected. It was involving women being portrayed in the paintings, often as looking at the viewer. There might be a picnic and there's men sitting around at the picnic, and then there'll be a couple of women and they're naked, and then they're looking at the viewer of the painting, like making eye contact with you as the viewer. This is really incredible observation that just this weird placement of women as objects for the pleasure, not just of the people characters in the picnic painting, but for the viewer, the person who is standing there looking at the painting. It also got popular through Laura mulvey, and she's a feminist film theorist, and she really popularized the concept and helped people understand it a lot more. She wrote an essay short essay called Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. So she's applying this idea specifically to film. And when I think about the first time I saw a Sofia Coppola movie, I was transfixed. There's a woman's perspective. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but then it was wrapped in a different gaze. And so, upon retrospect, you can look back at films that stick out for you and see who are the women making film, and how are they showing the gaze as being from a woman or from a woman of color? And as a kid, I loved shows like Laverne and Shirley and Charlie's Angels. They had female characters, and that's what I could gravitate towards. They weren't necessarily missing the male gaze, but there was a female protagonist that I could relate to, and that was exciting. Certainly Charlie's Angels was appealing to the male gaze, but it also appealed to women. There's also psychoanalytic roots in this, and in particular Jacques Lacan. His idea of gaze and Sigmund Freud had a concept of scope of philia, which is a great word. It's called the pleasure of looking. And considering these things, the gaze and the pleasure of looking, it explains a lot how cinema has conditioned us to look at women through this male or patriarchal gaze, specifically male, heterosexual, patriarchal gaze. So it shows up in film. It certainly shows up in art, and what's depicted in museums shows up in literature. And until we see that there are other options, that's just the gaze that we are inundated with. I wanted to learn more about this male gaze, and the artists and activists who are working to help us see from a different lens. So when we think about the psychological use of the gaze, the male gaze is included in kind of three areas. One is like the man behind the camera, like the male director. The male characters within the film or within the painting, and then the person looking at the film or the art. So there's someone directing it, there is the male character within, and then there's you as the viewer. I would also add to that. Who curated the art? Who selected that art? Who in the museum bought that art? And the lens that they have. Because it's not like we have access to all the art in the world. When we go to the museum or any museum, we go to see what a person or a museum or a board has decided is worthy of us seeing. So there's kind of this middle ground, and in film it would be who decides to pick up the film, what companies are producing it? Is it a male owned company or is it a female owned director? Female owned company? Now, taking it way back, we can look at what Jean-Paul Sartre introduced in the idea of gaze. And his idea was really the act of gazing at another human being creates what he calls a power difference. And it's felt by both the person looking and by the person being looked at. And often that person being looked at gets objectified, perceived as an object because they're being looked at. Now, certainly not every piece of art that's in a museum is going to have this particular kind of gaze. We think about expressionism or Impressionism, for example. There is another way in which we can look at things. The first kind of famous female artist that I ever heard of was Mary Cassatt. And she was an American ex-pat in Paris, and she depicted these realistic scenes of women and children in just everyday domestic life. She was really looking at the female experience and it was a female gaze. It was a female subject, right? The person in the painting and then the viewer. Male or female. You know, I don't think she was as curated necessarily as the the men in terms of having her art shown as often. So the viewer was maybe initially men not choosing her and then eventually choosing her and, and seeing her artwork as valuable because it was documenting the female lived experience at the time. There's also Bertha Morisot. She's a founding member of the Impressionist group, and she had really expressive brushstrokes, and she was focusing on modern Parisian life. And then Marie Brackman, she studied with Claude Monet, and she also painted a lot of outdoor garden scenes and kind of leisure activities and people enjoying themselves. So there's many, many artists who are women and are not painting from that perspective. Another group of women artists who didn't at all focus on that male gaze were the Expressionists. So the abstract expressionist movement in particular, the 20th century, um, and this was happening a lot in New York and in California. Elaine de Kooning, she did a lot of portraits. Again, rapid, linear brushstrokes. She was showing a lot of emotion. The Krasner, of course, um, rigorous geometric and it like, full of gesture. Joan Mitchell, which I think is incredible. There's a Joan Mitchell at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and she's famous for these huge, multi paneled abstract landscapes and again, rhythmic, gestural brushstrokes. So there's no need for that male gaze in this kind of expressionism. There's not characters in the artwork. It's a woman painting. So the person behind the camera or the artist is a woman. The figures are nonexistent in the artwork, and the viewer can be anybody. There's not the lens of the male gaze through which these artists are looking. And you've heard me talk about the Guerrilla Girls before. This is so exciting. And I remember learning about them in the 80s. They're an anonymous group. It's a feminist art collective. They started out in New York City, and they're protesting sexism and racism within the whole art world. They always wear gorilla masks. They use a lot of humor. They use really, like, cool, bold, like, propaganda style posters. They make billboards. And they're really an advocacy group that's focused exclusively on identifying and trying to rectify the discrepancies in the art world, especially related to finances, whose art is being curated by the museums. How much are people being paid? Whose art is being excluded from the art museums and from the art world, and that so much money is going to kind of this middle management group of people, art collectors? And what exactly are the artists getting? Who are the artists getting in terms of who they are? Are women being included? No. Are women of color being included? No, not so much. They're an anonymous group, and that their goal in that is to, you know, prevent professional backlash. And the disguise was really a happy accident. And they decided that gorilla was a great metaphor for what they were trying to do. You can check out their website. It's Guerrilla girls.com, and they have hundreds of projects that you can read about that relate to sexism, racism, corruption in art and culture and what's happening for artists. And from when they began until now, the statistics haven't changed too much. It's such a small percentage of female artists and artists of color in museums all across the United States. It's really insignificant numbers. In a 2019 article. These statistics were reviewed, they looked at this research study, 40,000 works of art from 18 major art museums in the United States, and of these it included the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, National Gallery of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts. These are huge, big name, big budget galleries ready for the bleak, sobering statistics. 85% of artists are white, 87% are men. So the Metropolitan Museum of Art estimates that about 5% of its collection is attributed to women, and this statistic has hardly changed over time, in spite of the advocacy of the Guerrilla Girls. So in 40 years of their work, these numbers have not really changed. There's incredible need for diversity in art. And it's about, I think, starting with the museums and curating events that invite different communities to be part of the art experience. But it also includes hiring a more diverse group of people to curate the art shows. We understand already. There's incredible health benefits to engaging with the arts and participating in cultural events, especially related to the arts. We know this from the World Health Organization 2019 study on Arts and the health care. Being able to recognize ourselves, the culture, the artist, the gaze. When we go into a museum, it's more than just saying, oh, we're having Women's Night at the museum, or we're highlighting our Latino or Asian community this month. It takes more than that. It requires a lot of time and attention for us as individuals to learn more about women artists. As you can see, we are not exposed too much to women artists and a female gaze. I want to invite you to participate in the arts in your community. Now we know for health benefits, it requires, you know, once a month to be involved in a cultural event in your community. It really helps us, and I want you to think about what that means. It doesn't just mean going to the big art museums when they have like a family event or a free day. It also means checking out open studios where you live. It means seeing what local artists are doing, small local artists and supporting them. And I went not too long ago with my brother in law to some open studio, and we didn't purchase the expensive art, but we put some money into smaller things like cards or matted pictures to support that artist. And the idea of supporting a local artist has a ripple effect in a way that is profound. So in supporting a local artist, your. Voting with your dollar that art is important and that people in your community are important. And more and more we hear that we need to connect with other people. We need to get off our devices and engage, and figuring out how to support our local economy instead of ordering everything online has a huge impact. It ripples across your community. So if you buy from a local artist, she uses that money to pay for. I don't know that her kids childcare. So again, it stays in the community in many ways. The idea of being out in the world and connecting with other people while you look at art, it's so good for us. We can look at art without a little break for about 30 minutes, and then we need to sit for a few minutes or close our eyes for 10s rest. So when you go to an art museum, it's maybe not the greatest idea to plan to stay for six hours to try and, quote unquote, get your money's worth. So when you do go to an open studio, you can have a 30 minute enriching experience, head home and know that that's good for you and is good for the artist and it's good for your community. You can go to a museum and become a member, and that's one way to not worry about getting your money's worth. You can pop in for an hour and not feel like you have to stay to get that $30 money's worth. It allows you the opportunity to pop in and reflect. Other ways you can support the arts. Hang art in your house, buy some art at a local show or an open studio. Skip buying a big poster from the art museum and support a local artist and hang a real painting in your home. Give gifts of art. It's an incredible experience to receive art that either someone made for you or someone bought for you. You can of course make your own art and give it. You can purchase art cards. You can buy them from artists so you can make your own. You can give art books. I loved thrift books online, and it's an opportunity to purchase books that someone else has already read before at a much better rate. And it's, you know, participating in the economy in a different way. I would love to hear the ways that you support the arts in your community and how you're considering things like. Keeping money within your community. Supporting people in your community. How you can reflect on what that means for the male gaze in art. It doesn't require that much more effort to seek out women artists and designers and architects. There's a lot of options available, especially searching on the internet. Before you go to a museum or an art studio and see who you would like to support. And finally, subscribe to the free newsletter from the Guerrilla Girls, and it'll give you some really incredible information and empower you with the knowledge to make more conscious choices about the art you consume, so that you're seeking out art that makes you feel alive and engaged, such as Joan Mitchell. And you don't have to worry so much about wandering in and experiencing art through the male gaze. When you're really looking for, like, an enriching experience. All right. You can message me in the show notes. You can find me on Instagram at Amy Bacchus. I would love to hear more. If you want to hear a little bit more about art and desire, check out episode 160. And if you have a moment, I would love if you could drop in a five star review, write a comment. That's the kind of stuff that really makes the show go. And there's some women who are supporting the show, and they're kind of carrying the burden for everybody. Right now it's just 3 or $5 a month. You see, there's no ads here and I'm going to keep it that way. So if you could support the show for a few months, that would be another wonderful way to support your local woman artist. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and I look forward to speaking with you in the next episode.