The Needs of Male Visuality: The Rhetoric of Male Gaze in Snuff and Hard-Core Culture between Cinema and Literature
Abstract
The essay proposes a social and cultural interpretation of snuff and hard core culture in cinematographic and literary representations, by using the category of gaze and body on the male/female gender differences. This work aims to analyze two kind of male cultural needs:
- Visual: the male need of “seeing more” about the female body;
- Social and cultural: the need of having to re-establish male dominance against the destructuring action of feminism.
The field of analysis of cinematographic and literary outputs is focused on two titles: Snuff (1976) a movie produced by A. Shackleton, and the novel Snuff (2008) by Chuck Palahniuk. The movie is useful for the description of a snuff aesthetic and the rhetoric of male gaze; the novel instead is useful for the identification of relevant features about gender questions applied to extreme hard core pornography. At the end, it will be demonstrated the political attempt to reverse the hegemonic rhetoric of male gaze acting directly on the aesthetic of snuff movie ritual.
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