Queer Gaze
"If sexualization is the same as objectification, then our sexual worth as humans, particularly the sexual power of the feminine, cannot exist outside of the inanimate  or attached to any source of agency"
"... and if we are going to start understanding the sexualization of women differently - begin to separate it from the process of sexual objectification - we need to deconstruct what we see, re-contextualize it, and glimpse alternate experiences"

In Ways of Seeing Berger traces an entire heritage of the naked female form and its evolution into the nude.  For Berger it is important to distinguish nudity from nakedness and the role presentation and pose plays in our relationship to the uncovered body.  It is nudity that begins to speak of sexualization, but these days is seems challenging to separate such nudity from that which is sexualized at all, and more often than not, that which is sexualized and that which is objectified . As a queer woman the female body has always captured my fascination. I am captivated by its beauty, humbled by its diversity, and aroused by its sensuality. Yet despite my arousal, the line between sexualization and objectification still sits within my psyche.  I find I experience a woman’s personhood even as a lust after her body.  In the history of the nude which Berger speaks of we see the woman generally through a male gaze.  Feminists and art critiques speak of the male gaze which shapes our perceptions of women , but yet forget that there are women too who lust after women.  We sexualize women not just through a social construct given to relate to our sisters, but rather through the very nature of our sexuality.  As a woman, she whom we view is both us and other - objectification is at once altered by our ability to identify and relate.  

My goal by no means is to say that women, of any sexual orientation, do not objectify one another, or to refute objectification all together,  but rather to tease apart our relationship to the naked female form which is steeped in Barthesian myth and unilateral gaze. I ask whether sexualization is truly inseparable from objectification due to human nature, and how might our collective understanding be heteronormative? In the following I will attempt to briefly deconstruct some of our ideas around cognitive perception as a precursor to the use of film as a tool to deconstruct and decontextualize. In many ways I hope to tease apart at what point is a woman or any body made a thing - an object -  devoid of autonomy, human value, and dignity.  Is it though the sexual power of the naked form itself or is it rooted in culture, such as commodity form.

In The Art of Loving, Eric Fromm argues that in the 20th century even the domestic relationship, whether that of sexual play or civil partnership, has been reduced to one of exchange value. Can we then say that only the stripper or prostitute commodifies her body? Karl Marx would certainly agree that capitalism creates a society in which human relations are reduced to one of exchange on all planes. Does this inherently lead to objectification? We commodify our labour, either of body or mind, and yet it is possible for not all to fall into relations of objectification - it is possible to remember the humanity of those we engage with.  By commodifying her body the stripper or prostitute does not inherently objectify herself, she can remain aware of her humanity as someone else may deny it.

In his Discourse on Colonialism, Aime Cesaire argues that capitalism and its insatiable appetite leads to such cruelty as colonialism only by the thingification of others - that to objectify a person comes from a need to justify inhuman actions which are deemed necessary for the selfish interests of an individual or group.  So perhaps it is not a matter of an exchange economy or the forces of economy but that of how we perceive our own advancement - how we judge our own self worth and position ourselves alongside our moral compass.

Psychology would argue in favor of the former philosophers rather than the later in that much of how we perceive the world is effected by culture: from global versus local processing to analytic versus holistic reasoning, people tend to access these different mental processes in different ways depending on the cultures they exist within.  In this way objectification does not arise from biological fault, but rather exogenous factors such as social programming or capitalist systems.  The moral values we are taught could play a role, but psychology also tells us that humans are not particularly good at controlling emotions and behaviors.  We might see a woman first for her body and then for her personhood even though our moral compass is aligned to recognize her first and foremost for her total humanity.

In this film I hope to open up a discourse around objectification and to ask the viewer to consider some of the aforementioned questions. Science and philosophy point to culture and context playing a formative role in our perceptions, so how might art allow for such context to be shifted in order for the viewer to re-relate to the naked female form. Specifically how might a queer female perspective allow for a new contextualization.  Famous feminist philosophers Dworkin and Mackennon see pornography as the natural lead to objectification.  In many ways this is through the ways in which conventional male gaze pornography portrays women’s bodies and power dynamics. By exploring the act of undressing, something that is both rich in sexual connotation and present in the human mundane I begin to explore the grey area between the naked and the nude, the viewer and viewed, fetishized and normalized.  If we are going to begin understanding the sexualization of women differently and begin to separate it from the process of sexual objectification then we need to deconstruct what we see, re-contextualize it, and glimpse alternative experiences.  In many ways this piece is an attempt to deconstruct my own experience as a queer women as I see her as both body and soul.