Some of my earliest recollections include examining myself in a mirror and mentally separating my physical attributes. Growing up in India, my appearance was frequently commented on and either praised, or criticised, which is normal in our culture (Chandavarkar, 2023).
My self-examination was similar to Albrecht Durer’s (1528) anatomical woodcut cartoon of the ideal nude female figure: a fragmented construct. He believed that taking different parts of the body, an illustrated collage of sorts – the face of one, the breasts of another, the legs of a third, the shoulders of a fourth, and so on – would glorify man (Berger, 1972). However, the image I viewed of my own body was not as a complete whole. I was compelled to focus on certain parts, assessed through the lens of accepted standards of beauty, wellness, and sexuality.
From a young age, women are taught to constantly scrutinize their image. I often experienced feelings of inadequacy and shame that seemed to revolve around how others viewed at my body, causing me to look closely at myself, playing both spectator and spectacle (Berger, 1972). My Indian body feels fragmented, held together by the gaze especially because the worry of how others perceive us (women) is often centered on the male gaze.
In a time when image is power, representations of the female form have dominated our perception of women, observed as inherently masculine, phallic, and fetishised: an insight that is undoubtedly true in the case of visual representations in the white western conventions of the nude (Baker, 2002; Berger, 1972; Clark, 1957; Mulvey, 1989; Nead, 1992).
In Western art, the earliest portrayals of the female body were often linked to the biblical motif of Eve and her transgressions. These depictions were showcased in engravings and prints by artists such as Albrecht Durer, and others (Walsham, 2020). My encounter with an eighteenth-century English delftware plate adorned with a nude motif at the National Museum Wales prompted my practice-based research enquiry. I began to question how an ideology proliferated from a mere print, especially one of morality and modesty.
My research led me to the concept of the ‘male gaze’ which has been widely discussed from diverse perspectives of art, philosophy and cultural studies (Lacan, 1977; Mulvey, 1989). The term ‘male gaze’ was coined by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her essay Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema (1975). She argues that psychoanalytic film theory gives more importance to sight than other senses, leading to a gendered perspective of ‘looking’ at female figures facilitated through the medium of the film camera (Mulvey, 1989). Mulvey discusses a patriarchal framework that dominates the female body using visual tools of oppression to fragment the representation of the sexualized female figure. This fragmentation results in division; a splitting, and the embodiment of various gender stereotypes as women act out the role imposed on them, sustaining them as spectacle (Rosenblatt, 1990).
Feminist scholarship and colonial discourse has widely criticized the male gaze, originating from a hegemonic western context. These theories fail to acknowledge oppressed and marginalized groups that are subjected to the status of the ‘other’ (Bhambra, 2014; Chandavarkar, 2023; Hooks, 2013; McDonald, 2002; Mohanty, 2013; Nead, 1992; Rosenblatt, 1990; Said, 1995; Spivak, 2010). Through the concept of , Irigaray exposes the ways in which a patriarchal system absents and devalues the feminine (Irigaray, et al., 1985). Although many prominent feminist critics have dismissed Irigaray’s theories, it is crucial to bear in mind the possibility of misreading her
