Voyeurism

This term has several different meanings (e.g. paraphilia), but in my courses the term signifies what I would refer to as “visual exoticism.” For example, the National Geographic magazine, which is more than a hundred years old now, has been the bastion of what I call “voyeuristic exoticism” in this country, and in the West generally. In another sense the invention of the moving visual image (as represented by cinema, television, etc.), it can be legitimately argued, represents the technological expression of voyeurism—from this perspective, cinema, by definition is an expression of voyeurism. However, in the case of Hollywood cinema a particularly significant characteristic of cinematic voyeurism is what is usually referred to in the literature as “the stare.” The stare here does not refer to the neutral viewing or seeing but rather the culturally-determined looking where, depending upon who is doing the looking, the “look” becomes a psychological act of projection. A related term to the "stare" is the concept of the male gaze first articulated by the British academic and feminist theorist Laura Mulvey in an article she authored in 1975. This concept, which was based in part on psychoanalytic theory, drew attention to how Western cinema (and other cinemas as well around the world), as a consequence of the male domination of the industry in all its dimensions--from story-telling to the quest for verisimilitude in production to marketing--has often used the vehicle of moving images as an