In a protest against censorship, photographer A.L. Schafer staged this iconic photograph in 1934, violating as many rules as possible in one shot.
In her classic work Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure, feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey argued that film and television embody the male gaze, positioning women’s bodies purely as erotic objects for visual consumption, and centering male scopohilia. However, as visual narrative has expanded beyond male creators, we can see a new language of the female gaze emerging. In this still shot of Michael Sheen from The Good Fight (2017-19) the male body is eroticised in a way that undercuts the patriarchal gaze entirely, and instead presents us with a new model of scopophilic consumption. The first notable element is the overlong white shirt, which consciously echoes the common cinematic visual trope of a woman wearing a man’s business shirt as a post-coital coverup. The shirt covers the buttocks but leaves Sheen’s thighs exposed, which hints at vulnerability in a way that full nudity would not. The second element is the ornate mirror, an object usually associated with the feminine, in which women look at themselves the way men look at them. In this shot, Sheen has taken the place usually filled a woman as the object to be viewed and consumed by a female or queer gaze instead. In this essay I will
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