Scopophilia: Gaze, image and pleasure

In the culture we are in, the woman is the scopophilic object of the male gaze. Women and their bodies have become controlled by the patriarchal structure. For this reason, the woman taught to watch herself also turned into a spectacle object. Mulvey's article titled Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema also pointed to the use of women as a spectacle in mainstream cinema. In Western art, the painting of naked women has been a recurring subject to serve the male's pleasure of looking. In the pictures made in this context, the nude woman is produced in order to reflect the view of the man's voyeur. It includes erotic and exhibitionist images of women watching and peeping on themselves. After the 1960s, female artists criticized the visual codes by using methods such as mimesis, parody and appropriation to oppose the position of the object being looked at. They aimed to create a recreated image by appropriating existing representations. The research covers how artists deal with the female body and image in an artistic manner, including their own bodies. In the application studies carried out within the scope of the thesis, scopophilia, image, gaze, pleasure, eroticism and exhibitionist concepts are explained with a plastic language.