Disrupting the Male Gaze

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-belooked-at-ness. Laura Mulvey

In 1968 and 1969 Jan Nigro made two series of seemingly unremarkable drawings. Entitled Summer Encounter and The Haast River Series, these works document in pencil various anonymous women. However, if we consider these drawings in relation to Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze, formulated in 1975, they take on an aspect that is quite remarkable. In one of the drawings, entitled Summer Encounter, Nigro has utilised the limited frame of visibility provided by the paper’s edge to cut through the body of the woman, rendering her faceless and unseeing. The tilt of her head, the cascade of her hair, the angle from which we view her: all combine to locate the spectator in a position of visual dominance.

The violence implicit in such visual dominance is rendered explicit in a drawing from the 1969 series , made in response to the infamous murder of Jennifer Mary Beard. Whereas in the violence enacted on the female body is purely visual, in this image the correlation between male spectatorship and real violence is made apparent. Here the closely cropped depiction of the male face centres on his eyes, rendering the male gaze quite literally. Following his sightline we see the silhouette of a faceless woman’s