My Eyes are up Here!: Defining the Female Gaze through a Comparative Analysis of Films throughout the Decades

• Main Author: Delos Reyes, Anka A.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: male gaze theory; female gaze; visual content analysis; digital zine; feminist film analysis; Arts and Humanities; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Game Design
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/conf_shsrescon/2022/arts_da/12; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1116&context=conf_shsrescon
• Institution: De La Salle University

The male gaze is a trend that has been observed in film for decades, and the oversaturation of inaccurate portrayals of women can be harmful as these portrayals affect women’s self-perception and regress the efforts of feminst movements. Given this, the study aims to define, characterize and illustrate an alternative to the male gaze through My Eyes are up Here! A digital zine that reimagines films adopting the female gaze, rather than its objectifying counterpart. To collect data for the study, visual content analysis of films from different genres and decades was conducted following a set of codes, and the data collected was compared by decade to see the different ways the films portrayed their female characters; with the results and analysis informing what changes needed to be made to create realistic depictions of women. Through the analysis, it was found that while the later films made certain improvements on depictions of female characters, the films always ended up relying on established tropes in the genre that disempower the female characters, and they still lack agency even in narratives that are about them. The digital zine combines traditional and digital zine-making techniques, such as printing and scanning images and compositing elements together digitally. This was done in order to evoke the same quality that historical feminost zines have. The zine aims to highlight the lack of humanized representations of women in film, and to offer a solution as to how this lack of accurate representation can be addressed.