Gaze
Classical Hollywood cinema and contemporary media forms often depict women as objects and make them available for the pleasurable and controlling look, or gaze, of spectators, who are coded as white heterosexual men. Critical scholarship on the gaze is concerned with how gendered, raced, eroticized, and controlled bodies become visible within media and other texts, and how individuals look at, identify with, and are constructed by visual representations. The conceptions of desire, identity, and identification articulated in this work are sometimes critiqued for being inattentive to racial differences and the varied ways people view representations. However, reconfigured theories of the gaze can address gender, race, sexuality, and other identities and reveal how new media intermesh gazing, touching, and accessing (White 2006, 2015).