I recommend people watch Berger’s Ways of Seeing from a critical perspective.
Whether it be a woman observing female or male nudes, Berger fails to realise that the sexual gaze is not exclusive to men. But no sexual agency is ever offered to women. If Berger was committed to heteronormativity in his claims, perhaps he should have considered that male nudes or Roman sculpture may also be sexually appealing to women. The further flaw in Berger’s assumption that nudes can only be observed, to the sexual gratification of men, is that it fails to consider that perhaps, these images might actually gratify women? Granted, the typically unachievable curvy-yet-slim body type seen in much of the artworks he includes do appear to be products of patriarchal expectations of women’s appearance but the complete failure to acknowledge that nudes, if deemed subjects of desire, may be desirable to a wider selection of people. This excludes any idea that the subject was a complex person, separate from men and the painting, whilst ignoring the fact that the artist and subject would have had a form of human relationship which maybe (just maybe) wasn’t all about sex! This claim ironically neglects any ideas of female agency as it assumes that the intentions in creating pieces were solely to gratify men. By merely existing, in her natural form, she is diminished as an object. There is no doubt that there is a vast collection of nudes out there however, Berger’s argument continues the idea of objectification by assuming that if a woman is naked, she must always be sexualised during her observation.
#JOHN BERGER WAYS OF SEEING EPISODE 2 SERIES#
Conversely, what stood out to me, was that despite this agenda, the piece was riddled with patriarchal, heteronormative assumptions in discussions of the female nude.īerger uses a series of randomly selected pieces of art, spanning hundreds of years, in an attempt to validate his argument that women have played an unchangeable role as objects, supposedly evidenced by the prevalence of nude female paintings.
The context is clear in the piece, which critiques society, through the medium of art history, aiming that criticism at women’s roles as subjects of the male gaze. Berger created his documentary during the period of second wave feminism which saw the revising of Marxist ideas, applying egalitarianism to factors beyond economics in particular, to cultural studies.