الفهرس 
The Male GazeOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
In a world that is complex with subversions and hybridity there is no fixed borders between us and them, but a liminal space where metamorphosis takes place to subvert and re-subvert the power relations to produce a new identity in all the facets of life where there are no binary oppositions or a strict border between one and the other, a new world with imaginary borders. Subversions, hybridity, space and archipelagic thinking became new techniques to reflect upon culture, identity and power negotiations. It is not simple role reversals, but a carnivalesque imbibed with ambivalence each against the other to create a new horizon in a new world.
Women in this postcolonial world are like living in a brothel, looked upon as an erotic figure, a spectacle to be looked-at-ness, the other, the mystic that should be fetishized. Women have to negotiate their subject position as ordinary human beings in a patriarchal hegemonic society, a mimic woman, a hybrid, forcing her position through mimesis, hybridity, subversion or carnivalesque. They struggle and negotiate their subjectivity with a forked tongue and a forked vision that subverts the male gaze and power presented in society and represented in tele-visual media.
Feminist film theorists since Mulvey’s seminal article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” did crack the mirror to destroy traditional patterns of visual and narrative pleasure and reflect new images of women where the mimicry of the image reflected reveals something that is distinct from what might be called an “itself” that is behind as Lacan argues. Lacan’s mimicry is not only an adaptive mechanism, but is also ambivalent, enriching and threatening. Mimicry subverts the objectification of women by reflecting new images through the fissures of the cracked mirror.
Adopting Bhabhian discourse to cinema and films: mimicry, ambivalence and hybridity will be a new discovery for new self-images for women in audio-visual media. Mimicry is both resemblance and menace and so is cinema. Cinema is complicit with and resistant to film dominant forms. The menace of mimicry is its double vision and double articulation revealing the ambivalence of the postcolonial/patriarchal discourse and disrupting its authority. Similarly, the screen has an ambivalent role to the image of women on the screen and women as spectators.
The screen adaptations of the chosen films challenge the restrictions of feminist film theory, reconceptualizing women’s image and spectatorship through destabilizing, reproducing, or reconstructing the gaze. It employs visual and narrative pleasure to reconstruct a feminist position rather than induce one. A multidisciplinary approach is integrated with the male gaze theory within the framework of feminist film theory, exploring the film adaptation of three Egyptian novels: Naguib Mahfouz’s Al Qahira Al Geedida (1945) and Tharthara Fawaq Al Nil (1966), and Latifa Al Zayaat’s Novel Al Bab Al Maftouh (1960). The screen adaptations cater for new types of spectatorship and presents new images of woman, rather than presenting an unrealistic distorted subjectivity and stereotypical objectification. Visual and narrative pleasure is created through cinematic codes that are necessary in the analysis of the character, narrative (how and when the spectator acquires knowledge of narrative events), framing (the presentation of visual elements in an image, especially the placement of the subject in relation to other objects), point of view, camera, metaphor, movement et cetra. In the adaptation of films, through the focus on the male gaze, the cinematic codes and the camera perspective, we experience how through the eye of the camera and the image allusions synchronized with it, and the close-up shots the characters are characterized. Through the films we are presented with different images of women who are independent and dynamic whether they are mothers, wives, prostitutes or daughters. They are not submissive, but struggle and are able to survive and face the world.
Theoretical Approach
The analysis will unfold how traditional cinematic means are transformed to communicate non-traditional ideas, and the representation of female “subjectivity” in cinema. Adopting Foucault’s power relations, Brecht’s V-effect or alienation technique together with the concept of hybridity by Homi Bhabha and Robert Young, and Glissant’s archipelagic thinking will allow for a less negative outlook on desire, subjectivity, and identity through the images, thus opening readings of film as embodying many forms of desire and creating many experiences of affirmation for the spectator. Hybridity in the use of cinematic codes integrated with Deleuze’s difference and repetition and the use of the directors’ as Salah Abou Seif,, Henry Barakat and Hussein Kamal of critical gaze, framing and voice-over to articulate non-conventional ideas and images, stripping the stereotypical image of woman as an erotic figure and uncovering her true identity and awareness of her subject position as a human being not as an object. Moreover, an application of Foucault’s theory of power facilitates an understanding of subjectivity where we have the potential to become a subject through means that challenge what we are culturally forced into. These subversive cracks which reflect traditional representations of female subjectivity, hit the eye of the camera to introduce a breakdown in classical forms of representation. Once the silver screen has cracked, the image will never look the same.
Finally, the cinematic codes will help foreground a focus upon the camera as a component of the director’s creative vision, together with the discussion of the basic film form and visual components that compose the complex relation between the director, the film and the spectator to challenge the restrictions or limitations of the film theory.
Research Questions
Feminist film makers still utilize visual and narrative pleasure to construct new ways of looking at and expressing femininity (through exaggeration and metaphors, and symbolism in an image of visual excess). They makers refer not only to women, but to women and men who present femininity in a positive way.
This study attempts to answer the following questions in relation to screen adaptations by male directors within a multidisciplinary perspective:
• How through subverting the male gaze, the traditional images, narratives and representations of women are challenged, to reconstruct and present a new subject position and new images for them?
• How does the male gaze address and construct the female character, spectator and female subjectivity?
• How do directors (through the cinematic codes and the eye of the camera) subvert the male gaze and change the mainstream cultural representation of female subjectivity to a presentation of a subject in continual progress?
• How does the reception of these films perpetuate or else change the sociocultural gaze towards woman as objects (to be looked-at-ness)?
Hypothesis
This study investigates the cinematic representations of the images of women in films and their analysis within the framework of feminist film theory integrating hybridity as a key feature to the analyses of the male gaze as a subversive tool to the mainstream “image of woman”. This study attempts to represent women’s image in films through destabilizing “the gaze” in chosen screen adaptations of three Egyptian novels. Feminist film theory drew the insight that traditional cinema (mainstream cinema) investigates that the sign of “Woman” can only signify anything in relation to men. Films since the inauguration of Arab Hollywood cinema (Egypt) used to represent woman as an “object” to emphasize her “otherness” or her non-existence. This study attempts to reconceptualize women’s presentation in cinema and as a spectator through destabilizing “the gaze” in chosen screen adaptations of three Egyptian novels: Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Modern (1945), Adrift the Nile (1966), and Latifa Al Zayaat’s The Open Door (1960). The study challenges the limitations in representing the image of women in Egyptian cinema to focus on new narrative and visual pleasures. Feminist film theory in an eclectic correlation with the male gaze, and an analysis of power relations and hybridity, can provide for a radical analysis of the presentation of the image of woman in audio-visual media and thus, in culture. The study also interprets how cinematic codes and style can free the camera as well as the spectators from the objectification of women.
The Thesis layout
The thesis is divided into an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion. Chapter One entitled: The Male Gaze, questions the concept of the ‘Male Gaze’ and its nuances, and its development as adopted by film theorists. It focuses on the postmodern concepts and theorists that deny binaries. Most postmodern theorists call for the eradication of binaries like male/female, active/passive, spectacle/spectator, public/private, island/ continent, but calls for openness, fluidity, hybridity, third space that does not fix, but transforms into a place which is neither nor, a place where metamorphosis take places. This approach is also adopted in cinema where framing, images and space are also hybridized to reflect a multiplicity of assemblage as we in this postmodern world live in a world of islands rather than islands of the world. Cinema as an acoustic mirror reflects images that subvert the male gaze. The chapter outlines the concept of the male gaze beginning with Mulvey’s “Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), ending up with Teresa de Lauretis Technologies of Gender (1987) which addresses the question of gender in theoretical and postmodern discourse, and in cinema to argue a radical representation of the dominant forms of western culture, and film. The concept sexual difference is more restricting and enforcing binary opposition of male/female rather than liberating. Foucault and De Lauretis argue against fixity or binary oppositions, they seek hybridity, that there is always an in-between position, a slippage. a neither nor position that subverts the stereotypical images of women. focusing on the directors Salah Abou Seif, Hussein Kamal and Henry Barakat and their use of the cinematic codes and techniques differently in their analysis of the films.
Chapter Two: Cinematic Codes as Subversive Cracks to the Acoustic Mirror, argues and integrates the traditional cinematic codes with the theoretical framework using a multidisciplinary approach to read the films and the presentations of new images of woman. Hybridity is the key term for the analysis of the image of women as represented in audio-visual media and how this image challenges the mainstream image of women in mainstream cinema using traditional cinematic codes in a radical way to unveil new and autonomous images of women in a brave new world. Using the figurative power of the stilled image through framing characters, doors, windows, mirrors. The use of emotional and narrative excess used in the films are transformed into visual excess manifested in cinematic codes: the use of frames, windows, mirrors, metaphors, and voice-over. By juxtaposing the stilled and moving image to demonstrate the new space between the photographic and the visual image, between the familiar and unfamiliar, thus deriving cinematic pleasure in the attractions of the cinematic codes and the play on the words to reveal a double meaning and subvert the male gaze, where strong emotions are created in the space between the image and its representation through the conventional cinematic codes in a new skillful method so as not to concentrate on the strong emotions or the plot, but on the techniques of representation and the image. It reflects how the cinematic codes enforce new and different images of woman in a brave new world, rupturing the male gaze, and the eye of the camera through visual excess, modes of different types of shots: close up shots, medium shots and long shots, sound effects, music, mise en scene, light, metaphor, exaggeration, visual excess, still and moving image, frames and mirrors, presents a liminal space of contestations and displacement.
Chapter Three: The Male Gaze as Memory and Space, investigates the voice-over as one of the subtlest and most undermined cinematic code. It questions its relatedness and connectedness to space and place. It is a frame within a frame where a word is an image. It reflects new ways of conceiving the relationships between words and images. The image is not an illustrations of the voice-over and the voice-over is not interpreting images, but they are separate entities. The relationship between word and image, the gaps, the delays, and the excesses that disturb their effect on the spectator. This chapter argues how different theorists like Manoel de Oliveira state that the voice-over is an image, as it allows us to see through the image and the narratological point of view. The framed or the moving image is conflicted with the voice-over narrator/character or monologues of stream of consciousness that concentrates on the metaphoric meaning of the story that sometimes coerces the image and subverts the gaze. The voice-over like other cinematic codes is also hybridized, that is it is not only a sound, nor it is only an image, but much more, it is a space, a memory, that encompasses visual, metaphorical, and different point of view, gestus and all other codes as framing, the images as alienating and connecting, denoting and connoting depending on the frame and the point of view. The reflected images are burdened with deeper meanings, conflicting, rupturing, harmonizing and opposing, all in one, a multiplicity of assemblage.
Finally, the conclusion reflects the new innovations in the representation of the image of women in films to unveil new fields of visions through different cinematic codes, presenting women in a new way as an ordinary human being not as stereotyped. passive image catered for the male desire. The chosen films discover new images of women rather than appropriate these images.