‘If you look at me like at a piece of meat, then that’s a problem’ – women in the center of the male gaze. Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis as a tool of critique

Abstract

This article proposes a discursive approach to beauty, which it illustrates with a close data analysis of women's relationship with the ‘male gaze’. In gender and feminist studies, the male gaze is invoked with reference to the patriarchal surveillance of women's bodies. The article complements studies that approach the surveillance as a socio-cultural phenomenon by investigating it as a discursive accomplishment of a social relation and identification. Taking a Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis approach to the matter (and combining it with a discursive psychological perspective), this article focuses on the complexities and ambiguities underwriting individuals’ personalized ways of dealing with being looked at. Women's positioning to the male gaze by means of culturally available discourses is found to reveal ambiguous sites of agency and submission within its scope. Examining them, the article addresses the importance of combining a feminist poststructuralist perspective on the relations of gender with women's lived understandings of being implicated in them. (How) can lived and academic sensibilities be set side by side in gender research? Is there a methodology of discourse analysis that facilitates this?

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