This makes no sense at all, though, given that games not only allow but encourage the player’s self-insertion into the narrative, inviting people of all sorts to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. And yet, critics have clung hard to the idea of the “male gaze” in games, perhaps in part because we’ve also been making lots of assumptions, over the years, about the “intended” audience of games. We discount the interests of non-men entirely, since any enjoyment they might have is considered “unintentional” on the part of the creators, and therefore irrelevant. We also pretend to know what “all” men might like to gaze at-women’s butts, apparently? I doubt that. ![]() When we use this phrase, we assume the game’s developers are male this is true most of the time, but not all of the time nowadays (thank goodness). In other words, “male gaze” is a phrase that makes a lot of assumptions, and none of them make sense in the context of games. Jackie Stacey points out that “the specifically homosexual pleasures of female spectatorship have been ignored completely” by the term “male gaze,” which results in a particularly reductive role for women: “the female spectator is offered only the three rather frustrating options of masculinisation, masochism or marginality.” But not all men are straight-and not all camera-holders are men-nor are all spectators! In the 1987 article “Desperately Seeking Difference: Desire between Women in Narrative Cinema,” Film Studies and Women’s Studies Prof. “Male gaze” originally referred to an assumption that the camera, and the theoretical spectator, are assumed to be male. ![]() It’s not only that most people use the phrase incorrectly, although that’s part of the problem-it’s more that the phrase already got debunked by feminist film theorists decades ago. ![]() I hereby call for an end to the phrase “male gaze” in all future videogame criticism.
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