How significant is gender to a spectators experience and what evidence do you have for your argument?

How significant is gender to a spectators experience and what evidence do you have for your argument?

Gender appears to be important with a spectator’s experience, as with the spectator’s gender they are able to align with the characters easier and specialized to themselves. Your gender affects the ways in which you see things and understand things, as your gender affects different experiences.

Freud’s psychoanalysis theory is argued to affect the way our gender affects our spectatorship as different genders have different conscious thoughts that they want to repress so would see things differently, depending on their own conscious and unconscious thoughts. Freud argued that women were envious of men’s penis’, with this view it may affect a female’s experience of a film as if they were envious they may dislike the male characters, causing them to not align with that character and this may create them to have a different view and understanding of that film entirely.

The male gaze theory affects the ways spectators view something, as all spectators are seeing the same event through the perspective of a male and the sexualized female on screen. We are seeing things through a voyeuristic view where the spectator cannot help but look.  This can be applied to the film ‘Black Swan’ as by having the male gaze in this film, male spectators may be awarded with some sort of sexual gratification with the images and voyeuristic camera shots we have of the main female character. The scene in which her dance instructor touches up Natalie Portman’s character whilst he is supposedly helping her is an example of this as there are extreme close up’s of parts of her body. Heterosexual females may not see this voyeuristic look on the female character so may interpret this in different ways to which male characters did.

The ways in which the spectators connect with the film affects their viewing experience and this can be argued to be affected by their gender. Males and females align with different characters as they have different feelings towards characters which is affected by their own gender, often due to feeling sympathetic towards certain characters, finding aspects of yourself within the characters and aligning with them this way. Emotional response is also affected in the same way as your gender may affect the ways you see certain things happening with the film and your gender can affect the ways you respond to this and your understanding of messages from this.

There are also oppositional reading’s that we can see, for example for the female gaze theory. This can be seen in the film ‘Magic Mike’ in which there is sexual gratification but for females as we are seen looking voyeuristic at the male characters. However, it is noticed that the female gaze is not as direct as the male gaze is in Black Swan as perhaps this is not seen as acceptable so it is more rare and causes much more of a fuss over it. This female gaze would affect the spectator’s viewing as female’s may have some sexual gratification by watching male’s stripping.