Laura Mulvey

The Gaze deals with how and audience views the people represented.

For feminists, the gaze can be thought of in three ways:

-How men view women
-How women view themselves
-How women look at other women

The theory of the 'Male Gaze' was formed in 1975 by Mulvey. Laura Mulvey believed that all audiences had to view the representation of characters through the perspective of a hetrosexual male.
Mulvey began to identify certain characteristics of the Male Gaze, techniques in the way films were shot such as cameras lingering on parts of a woman's body, which Mulvey believed relegated women to the status of objects.

 As a result, Mulvey believed that women were 'the bearer of meaning and not the maker of meaning.' Her statement suggests that women were not placed in a role that has control of a scene. Rather, they're something that's looked at in a scene and from a very specific point of view. Additionally, she also believed that this perspective was never reversed so that men were the ones being viewed. She argued that this inequality enforced the notion that,'men do the looking, and women are to be looked at.'

My example of the Male Gaze in film.

Project X...  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jre6_FBBc0

In this video alone, young men are throwing girls into pools, using leaf blowers to blow girls skirts up, the camera is showing slowed down shots of girls licking each other. Project X is a prime example of the extreme lengths the male gaze can go too.

In this film, both visual signification and technical signification play a part in how the Male Gaze is presented to the viewer.

Visually, girls are seen throughout extremely sexualised, wearing limited, if any clothing. Shots of girls participating in sexual acts again are common.

Technically - The majority of the scenes mentioned above as slowed down, lengthening the time of the shot therefore relegating women to objects as Mulvey explained. Camera placement also plays a key part as in a few shots the camera has been placed to directly shoot up women's skirts.

In more recent years it has been discovered that 'The female gaze' is also apparent in certain films.
The Female Gaze is a Gaze trope about the way a work is presented as from a female perspective or reflects female attitudes, either because of the creator's gender or because it is deliberately aimed at a female audience. While it can contribute to it, Female Gaze is not restricted to looking at sexy men but is more importantly about the expectations of how the (presumptive) audience relates to the work.