| The action of looking is never simple.In patriarchal society,female is always under the gaze of male.As Van Zoonen puts it,"a core element of western patriarchal culture is the display of women as spectacle to be looked at,subjected to the gaze of the male audience".Through male gaze,the hierarchical order of gender is maintained and reinforced.In this regard,Laura Mulvey raised the concept of "male gaze",and revealed the unbalanced power structure in patriarchal society between male and female.With the development of the society and Internet technology,new media forms have emerged,which also changes the forms of looking.More and more female-targeted male images have emerged on media,especially on the new media platforms.They cater to female preference of beauty,attract female attention,and form a female gaze spectacle.At the same time,new media technology enables the audience,who used to be silent and unable to speak,to express their views freely through comments and likes,making the audience’s gaze easier to observe.Thus,the new structure of gaze,where female is spectators and male is object is formed in the new media environment.It seems that through this new gaze structure,women are now free to look at and judge the male body,providing possibilities of resisting the traditional male gaze and patriarchal power.What is the mechanism of this kind of new gendered gaze on new media platforms?What’s the difference between this gendered gaze and the traditional male gaze?Does it represent a rise of female power?What kind of desires and power relationships are involved?The answers to these questions are not yet clear.Using content analysis and critical discourse analysis,this study takes short videos presenting male body on "Douyin" platform as example to explore these questions.Specific research questions include:1.What kind of masculinities are constructed in short videos presenting male body?2.How do spectators gaze at the male body?3.What kind of desire and power relations are contained in the gendered gaze?The findings are as follows:1.The masculinities in the short videos presenting male body can be divided into three types:"Little fresh meat" with beautiful face,muscular guys showing off male strength and erotic man bearing female desire.There are three features in the construction of masculinity:the masculinities are diversified in this kind of short videos;male bodies are objectified;and the short videos still pursue hegemonic masculinity.2.The audience gaze at the male bodies in three ways:projecting desire,creating relationships and disciplining.3.With the development of media technology,short videos have become the material carrier of gendered gaze,which condenses the spectators’ desire of voyeurism,the desire of possessive,and the desire of becoming the ideal self.At the same time,the short videos reproduced the panoramic prison,in which male with the gender power given by the patriarchal society become the object of gaze,and they need to defend their position,while the female audience are competing for gender power with the help of gaze power.4.The "female gaze landscape" reveals the awakening of female consciousness,and it represents the rise of female gaze as a rebel power against male gaze.However,this kind of female gaze is not the right way to fight for gender equivalence for it still follows the binary oppositional thoughts and creates new forms of opposition by objectifying male.At last,this paper finds that there are some problems existing in short videos that presenting male bodies,including the eroticism of male body,and the short videos tend to be superficial and meaningless.The paper proposes that the platform,the government and users should work together and build a clean and positive cyberspace. |
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