Short answers, pulled from the story.
The gaze, known in French as le regard, is an individual's or group's awareness and perception of other individuals, groups, or oneself. Philosophers including Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida developed the concept across the 20th century to explore power, identity, and social dynamics.
The term "male gaze" was first used by the English art critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing, a BBC film series that aired in January 1972. It describes the asymmetry in which men are positioned as watchers and women as objects to be looked at, particularly in European painting and cinema.
Laura Mulvey argued in her 1975 essay that Hollywood cinema associates masculinity with activity and femininity with passivity, positioning viewers in the role of the active masculine subject who desires the passive feminine figure on screen. Her work became foundational in feminist film theory.
In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the gaze has two phases. Early in his work, Lacan connected it to the mirror stage, in which a child discovers their external appearance and enters culture. Later, Lacan redefined the gaze as the anxious feeling of being watched, where the object of perception appears to look back at the subject, producing a loss of autonomy.
Bell hooks introduced the oppositional gaze in her 1992 essay "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectatorship." It describes the critical perspective of Black women looking back at cinema that has historically misrepresented them as stereotypical characters such as the Mammy, Jezebel, or Sapphire. Hooks framed oppositionality as a key paradigm in feminist analysis of Western visual culture.
Objectification theory was proposed by Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts in 1997. It is a framework that examines the lived experience of sexual objectification, defined as being treated as a body valued primarily for others' use. The theory identifies three arenas where this occurs: interpersonal encounters, visual media depicting social situations, and visual media displaying bodies or body parts.