The Female Body as Simulacra

Abstract:
Media analysis including Laura Mulvey's work "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" has identified that representations of women in film and media are almost always informed by the "male gaze." That is, women as portrayed in media exist to be looked at, often with male characters standing in as surrogate voyeurs for the male audience. The idea of the female image as a socially constructed outlet for male desire is intensified in the post-modern era, in which our understanding of reality is informed and shaped by the images we see in media and pop-culture. With the advent of generative AI, the image of the female body can be simulated without an origin in physical reality, and the images of living women can be endlessly abused and manipulated. While mass media effectively separates the image of the female body from the subject of the woman, reducing it to an object for the pleasure of the male gaze, Deepfake technology reanimates the image, replacing the real. Through a comparative analysis of the visual representations of women in media and Jean Baudrillard's theory of simulacra, this project will explore the evolution of the male gaze in society and media images, and confront the abuse of the female body in our current AI landscape.

Works Cited

“Representation stems from the principle of equivalence of the sign and the real (even if this equivalent is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum” (6).

-Jean Baudrillard,
Simulacra and Simulation