Male Gaze and Ideological Formations in Nepalese Television Commercials

Abstract

This paper explores into the semiotics of Nepalese mass media, especially the television commercials which display a sort of obsession with portraying men-women relation in a manner that caters to male voyeuristic gaze. The structuration of the Nepalese television advertisements shows how an all-pervasive psychological force, gears to monopolize the audience of the television commercials as only males by positioning the women characters therein as passive sexual objects who can only exhibit to-be-looked-at-ness and the male characters as the principal viewer. This paper examines the Nepalese television commercials with the theoretical possibilities provided by the psychoanalysis, where the idea of voyeurism and fetishism are central and the Focauldian concept of gaze, where the activity of looking images under certain spectacles provide privileged power for dominion over what is being looked at. The research thus takes on to explicate how the combination of these two effects in Nepalese television commercials lead to ideological formations.