What is Male Gaze

The phallus took its place at the basis of the representations of power in social law with the transition from nature to culture/civilization. For this reason, Lacan, unlike Freud, searches for the phallus in culture, language, and gaze rather than in the body. Likewise, starting from psychoanalysis, Mulvey developed the theory of male gaze by analyzing gaze in cinema with feminist terminology. The Silence of The Lambs (1991) and its sequel Hannibal (2001) are films that allow for a Lacanian phallus and a Mulveyian male gaze reading. In films, the female hero struggles with the phallus and male gaze in a culture surrounded by masculine codes. She succeeds in castrating the phallus and cutting the male gaze that hinders her. Lacanian and Mulveyian psychoanalytic analysis was conducted on the films in the context of feminist film criticism.