India, Nov. 13 -- Film theorist and analyst Laura Mulvey coined the term 'male gaze' to describe mainstream male filmmakers' objectification of women. The term turns the focus on how the female body becomes a source of visual pleasure for men. The act of gazing creates a subjective power difference with the person being gazed at getting objectified ie being perceived more as an object and less as a human being with her own desires and agency. This is particularly apparent in the cinema of filmmakers of an earlier era like Raj Kapoor whose Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978) and Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985) were particularly voyeuristic in their presentation of the female body.

Here, the camera operated by a male director and an almost entirely ...