Male Gaze

The theory of the gaze, as established by psychologists Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, discusses the idea of being the object of a person’s look. When one realizes that he or she is the object of a person’s gaze, he or she may experience feelings of anxiety because of the loss of control over one’s own body. In 1999, Laura Mulvey builds upon the theory of the gaze in her article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by constructing the concept of a male gaze. Mulvey summarizes the notion of the male gaze as a heterosexual male actively objectifying a passive female recipient. She effectively limits females to being the object of the male gaze and heterosexual males to controlling the gaze, stating, “According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification” (Mulvey 838). By assigning heterosexual men and women to these specific roles in the dynamic of the gaze, Mulvey does not take into consideration the experiences of homosexual men.
When analyzing a text through a psychoanalytic lens, most researchers solely observe the effects of a heterosexual man’s sexually objectifying view of a woman. However, other researchers rightfully call this practice of exclusion into question. A.A.
Most of the time, research continues to overlook the similarities in the experiences of non-heterosexual individuals. In this paper, I will be analyzing the concept of the gaze in the context of a homosexual male’s objectifying view of another man through a close-read of Junot Diaz’s short story “Drown.” Throughout the story of “Drown,” Diaz demonstrates a unique portrayal of the male gaze by having the male narrator experience fearful and detached responses following his recognition that he is the object of companion Beto’s