Critical Perspectives: summary of "Woman as Objects - Feminist Critique" from "A Queer Romance" by Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman

This excerpt analyses the concept of the “male gaze” from the perspectives of several writers throughout the 20^th century, concluding with the analogy of Michel Foucault's concept of the panopticon: a prison in which a single watchman may be watching any of the prisoners at any time, requiring them to assume they are always under scrutiny. In a male-dominated society, women are in a similar position to those hypothetical prisoners: Evans and Gamman cite Simone de Beauvoir's descriptions of “learning to appraise her adolescent self through male eyes” and John Berger's observation that in our culture, the spectator is usually assumed to be male (“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”). The authors mention that Berger “has no model of discourse to explain power relations” besides an “implicit” one, and argue for Foucault's panopticon as an “explicit” model for discussing the objectification of women (while also touching on the objectification of men in the gay community), as opposed to looking at the topic through a purely psychoanalytic lens – they admit psychoanalysis has its uses, but state that it “offers an inadequate amount of desire underlying sexualised looking” in the discourse (“ideology is inscribed in discourse... a way of thinking speaking, experiencing”, as Catherine Belsey wrote) that is feminism. Evans and Gamman make it clear that women live in a society in which they are under constant scrutiny while arguing for the importance of analysing that fact using several different methods and perspectives.