Bordo, Essay Example

Bordo’s analysis of the Gaze focuses heavily on the effects of the subject position and how this role differs in quality and effect when inhabited by people of different genders and races. Bordo identifies as a older middle aged white heterosexual woman, but helps shed light on more than just her own social category’s experience under the gaze. Bordo highlights key areas of difference that determine how an individual will be affected within the role of object of the gaze. Obvious categories include skin color, gender and age, but she also emphasizes sexual orientation and income level as less visible but just as relevant differences.

For example, early on in the article Bordo illustrates a situation where a black man who is a teacher and therefore a professional is exercising in sweat clothes before work. As he runs by a white women, she “clutches her handbag more tightly, quickens her step; in her eyes the teacher is a potentially dangerous animal” (134). Here, the looker and their preconceived notions and stereotypes about how someone of such an appearance should behave damagingly alter the identity of the subject.

While the ‘gaze’ as a social phenomenon gained prominence with its telling analysis of women’s experience within a media sphere dominated by the masculine, Bordo shows how the gaze has changed to sexualize the male body to the same extent as the female. She cites numerous graphic examples to show how the male model in question adopts a position normally reserved for the female body, and “offers himself non-aggressively to the gaze of another” (133).

In general I feel that Bordo successfully evaluates the changing nature of the gaze and writes convincingly about how it transcends sexual and racial taboos in an interesting if more than occasionally threatening manner within the modern mass media sphere.

As an Arab heterosexual male student, I know having grown up in a post 9/11 world, my obvious ethnicity leads some individuals to react to me in a way similar to Bordo’s example of the black man who is a teacher jogging by the white woman who feels vulnerable and exposed as he passes because he is black despite the fact that he is an upstanding citizen and professional. Despite my well groomed appearance, because of the actions of some extremists who share my general ethnicity I become stereotyped as a ‘terrorist’ and strangers will sometimes hesitate and act unsure when interacting with me.