- social and cultural forces that regulate or patrol individual and group behaviors
- these forces may pressure people to conform to social/cultural norms; or abide by the rules of a community, nation, or social structure
- these forces may be explicit or implicit, direct or indirect
sur = from above
veill = watching
- observation, inspection, monitoring, patrolling
- surveillance typically involves the managing or controlling of people's behaviors
- "pan" = all
- "opticon" = seeing/observing
- originally a prison imagined by Jeremy Bentham in 1791
- a design for surveilling prisoners
- often a metaphor for all-seeing control
- in Greek mythology, Panoptes was a giant with a hundred eyes
The building circular—A cage, glazed—a glass lantern [...] The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference—The officers in the centre.
By blinds and other contrivances, the inspectors concealed […] from the observation of the prisoners:
hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence—
[...] One station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of every cell.
-Jeremy Bentham
- the gaze (Jacques Lacan)
- the white gaze (George Yancy)
- the medical gaze (Michel Foucault)
- the male gaze (Laura Mulvey)
- the policing gaze
- the surveilling gaze
- the imperial/postcolonial gaze
(E. Ann Kaplan & Edward Said)
- to look at; to look intently or watch steadily
- ( connected)the awareness of being visible & sometimes cause for anxiety
voyeurism: taking sexual pleasure in looking or watching, e.g. the Peeping Tom
the voyeur: French for “one who looks”
THE MALE GAZE
- film critic Laura Mulvey defined the male gaze in her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
- in it, she argues that film cameras tend to adopt a "male gaze" in their depiction of women and women's bodies
scopophilia: pleasure in looking;
Sigmund Freud called this “Schaulust.”
scopophobia: fear of being looked at