In her seminal film theory essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey uses Freudian and Lacanian analysis to explore gender politics in visual culture. “Pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female,” she says, and as the pleasure of cinema is derived from loss of ego and simultaneous ego ideal projection, viewers will identify with the 'gaze' of the protagonist. Given the domination of men in the film industry, this gaze is “male”, and the “determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly”. By focusing on the desires of the male gaze, cinema marginalizes representations of women, adding, in Mulvey’s own words: “a further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order”. In effect, women can only be represented on-screen as oppositional to men, either in conflict with them or subservient.
However, as Mulvey’s theory gained attention, feminist theorists and film makers have used Mulvey’s work to turn the male gaze on itself. The emergence of the archetype of the ‘new man’ and film studios looking to build bigger audiences means that, “at the beginning of the twenty-first century, classic voyeurism has changed, because the spectator does not look from the perspective of a dominant male gaze.”
One example of the changing nature of the gaze can be seen in Lady Gaga’s 2010 music video Alejandro. Much of the iconography in Alejandro is appropriated from the gay community, such as military uniforms, leather, and domination games. It also uses many signifiers of queer identity. In my analysis of the video I hope to show two things: that it is Lady Gaga’s intention to disrupt gaze, but also that because of the oppositional nature of both gender construction and ‘gaze’, it is ultimately impossible to produce a film without gaze. Therefore, in becoming the active (male) participant in the gaze, and using males as passive subjects, she is in fact using a gay male gaze.
From the start, we are presented with unconventional gender presentation: a man in heels and fishnet stockings. This image is further complicated as the man is topless and has a clearly male, masculine, face. Therefore this can’t be characterised as simple ‘drag’; without knowing whether the man identifies as genderqueer or transgender, both his sexuality and gender question social norms. This is a theme which is continued throughout the video, in particular the sequence of scenes where Lady Gaga interacts with her backing dancers (the costumes of the dancers are interesting themselves—identikit men wearing monk’s clothing, alluding to the usual presentation of women as without character and sexually passive) on several beds. The interactions between the men and Gaga are highly sexual. Often, Gaga is the aggressor in the play-sex and furthermore takes positions from which it would be impossible for either party to engage in physical sex without Gaga being a man (or wearing a sexual aid). Here we can see that Gaga, in her position of power within the narrative of Alejandro, uses it to render herself as an active participant and to turn the men into passive sexual objects, thus seemingly flipping the male gaze onto itself.
In comparison, the video for Madonna’s 1989 song Express Yourself has a similar feminist approach and shares many aesthetics, but uses little gay iconography. In Express Yourself, in a similarly dystopian environment to Alejandro, Madonna seduces a factory worker in a video filled with images eroticising the male form. However, Madonna is also equally glamorised in the video, as compared to Gaga who—even when she is wearing lingerie—is presented as sexless and androgynous. While the gaze spreads the attention around more, Madonna is not immune from the eroticisation of the camera. Gaga, on the other hand, intentionally shuns the gaze—or in more than one instance in the video, acts confrontationally to the viewer.
Interestingly, both Madonna and Lady Gaga wear male clothing for a portion of the videos, but whereas Madonna’s suit is ill-fitting and de-sexualising, Gaga’s is the opposite, and more reminiscent of Liza Minelli in Cabaret, another example of gay iconography, or another more pertinent example: Madonna, in her video for the song Vogue. Such use of iconography, irony and the nudging ‘homage’ to Madonna’s famous gay anthem (all examples of the ‘camp’ aesthetic as defined by Susan Sontag) leave no doubt of Gaga’s intentions to work for gay audiences.
From this comparison we can see that Gaga does challenge the ‘male gaze,’ but finding that the gaze isn’t something which can be ‘broken,’ instead shifts the gaze onto men. In order to be the ‘gazer’ of the image, she must become the actor of the film: a masculine trait. In other words, as the concept of masculinity is essentially synonymous with action, control and dominance, by taking control of the gaze Gaga inherits the ‘maleness’ of it, leaving the men to be gazed at.