3rd Global Conference
Friday 16th November - Sunday 18th
November 2007
Salzburg, Austria
Session 8: The Erotic Gaze
Chair: Fanny Söderbäck
Woman as Erotic Object: A Darwinian Inquiry into the Male Gaze
Griet Vandermassen
Centre for Gender Studies,
English Department,
Ghent University, Ghent,
Belgium
The term “male gaze” was coined by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, to denote the way in which women are relegated to the status of erotic objects in classical Hollywood cinema. Mulvey explained the existence of the male gaze in a psychoanalytic vein, arguing that woman, lacking a penis, symbolises the threat of castration. By objectifying woman on screen as a passive sexual object, man tries to gain control of her and to overcome his own castration fears. Considered from this within media studies highly influential perspective, the male gaze is a reflection of an unequal power relationship and a tool of domination: woman is reduced to to-be-looked-at-ness. This in turn is a reflection of the patriarchal order, which has coded the erotic in a way that tends to sustain patriarchy.
I will argue that the deeply visual nature of male sexuality and the male tendency to objectify women’s bodies has little to do with psychoanalytic concepts or with patriarchy, although the desire to control may play a role. The objectification of bodies is, for instance, a typical feature of gay male porn as well. Seen from a Darwinian perspective, the male gaze and the relative absence of a comparable female gaze is a reflection of evolved basic male and female sexual psychologies. Because the adaptive problems encountered by ancestral women and men in the realm of reproduction differed significantly, selection led to the evolution of different partner preferences and mating strategies in both sexes. These are differences in degree, not kind. These average psychological differences explain much of what women and men typically find erotic or sexually arousing. The specific expression of these preferences is, however, dependent upon cultural context.
Death and the Maiden: Vanitas and Voluptas, Transience and the Erotic in Hans Baldung Grien
Bozhena Anastassiades
Department of English and Communication,
European University Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus
The paper looks at the representations of the ‘Death and the maiden’ theme, particularly in Hans Baldung Grien, German painter and graphic artist, one of the most outstanding figures in Northern Renaissance art. It also seeks to locate the theme within a larger context of the aesthetic and creative representations of vanitas, recurrent in late Middle Ages and in Renaissance.
The vanitas, or memento mori type of painting was intended to exhort the viewer to reflect upon the vanity of worldly pursuits and the transitory nature of human life. It originated in Northern Europe in the late Middle Ages and continued to preoccupy painters, poets and composers long into the eighteenth century (Matthias Claudius, Franz Schubert, Edvard Munch and others).
Baldung Grien’s entire oeuvre can be viewed as a 16th century exploration of the vanitas theme in which he probed the connection between the physical and spiritual, and pondered the relationship of growth and decay, beauty and death, vanitas and voluptas. Among his most powerful statements of these themes are the depictions of ‘Death and the maiden’ and the ‘ages of (wo)men’ portrayed in the presence Death.
The motif of the ‘Death and the maiden’ is widely believed to have originated from the Medieval Totentanz (Dance of death) cycles. From the early 16th century, it occurs in numerous versions of strikingly eroticised images of voluptuous and sensually portrayed young women encountering a personification of Death: a man-like, masculine-like desiccated ‘un-dead’ corpse-like figure; their reactions vary and range from horror to acceptance, even a lover’s welcome. What is interesting in this artistic encounter with the tremendum and fascinosum of death is that it takes place in the context of the ‘erotic’ - as an imaginative interplay of the grotesque and the erotic.
Starting with Daniel Hopfer, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch and Hans Sebald Beham, thepaper seeks to examine the evolving treatments of the theme, with the subsequent focus on Hans Baldung Grien.