askchapo

It is not exclusive to film/criticism. It is applied to real life and film/art criticism is part of real life, as are art and film. It includes the phenomenon you describe as worrying about what people think of you and the phenomenon of worrying about how you are being perceived.

Let's start with an assumption that everything you are experiencing is at least mediated or instantiated through your nervous system. The experience of worrying about what people think of you is therefore something that is happening in your nervous system. The idea that it's "normal", as you say, is the idea that it is an experience that is shared by many people but without any of those people coordinating with each other. That indicates that there is some common cause for the neurological phenomenon that is shared among many people.

What is that common cause? It could be said that it is fundamentally an aspect encoded in all of our genetics to have this experiential phenomenon of worrying about what other people think of us. But that would imply that the experiences would be either predominantly similar, predominantly divergent along heritable lineages, or predominantly random.

We don't find any of that to be true. The worry about what other people think of us shows clear social differences. Women worry about different things than men do, children worry about different things adults do, women children and men children different from each other and from their adult analogs, non-gender-conforming or gender-queer folk experience different worries than gender-conforming or non-queer folk. Furrher, we see the things that people worried about 600 years ago have differences from things people today worry about. We even see those worries change within 20 years, let alone 600, and we see differences based on culture and we see that, when transplanting people from one culture to another, the worries maintain their content within the person, though prolong immersion in another society can produce changes.

What are we to make of all this? Well, we come to the conclusion that this ways in which we worry about what others think about us are in fact under active, dynamic, continuous social construction. They are processes we can examine and analyze. And what we find is that our worries don't only come from our interactions with other people, they come from our interactions with artifacts that other people created despite never coming into contact with the creator. Advertising, moves, art, novels, myths, songs... All of these things contribute to what people worry about when they worry about what other people think of them. And we find that these artifacts are created in this way sometimes because people are worried what others will think of them, but more often because people hold a worldview that assumes these ways of producing and representing are "the way we do these things".

And thus, we arrive at the male gaze. It is a term we use to describe the internal representation of the policing behavior of men in a society, such that people act as though they are actively being directed or judged by men who are physically present and motivated to control the behavior of others for the benefit of themselves as men.

The term comes from the concept of the Panopticon, wherein prisoners are all able to be watched by guards at all times, but are themselves unable to see the guards. Under these conditions, the prisoners act however they want and get actively punished for going against the wishes of the guards, so long as their behavior is observed by those guards. By staffing the prison watch heavily in the beginning, you set the preconditions for people to police themselves, meaning they will choose to behave despite not knowing if they are being watched because their nervous system is trained to incorporate the wishes of the guards, arrived at not explicitly but implicitly by the interpretation of the rewards, punishments, and negligence of the guards to their behavior.

The gaze essentially refers to the process that is instantiated in the nervous systems of all the humans that are part of that particular gaze process and the information embedded in the artifacts produced by these humans. We can imagine seeing the evidence for the gaze in long-dead civilization by looking at their artifacts. And we can imagine the process of that gaze being stopped by an extinction event but started up again by discoverers of the artifacts of the civilization as they bring the information of those artifacts into their own social construction process of the gazes within their society.

The thing that made this mostly clear to me was a story about drug addicts.

Someone who was studying state violence decided to research communities of drug addicts. In this one community of heroin addicts, there was clearly structural violence: beatings and killing by cops, arrest, imprisonment, negligence and abandonment, restriction of rights, low access to food and other life necessities, ambient social rejection, etc. But there was also intimate violence: a drug addict in the community commiting acts of violence agaist another drug addict in the same community.

The researcher interviewed and studied these communities and learned something interesting. The perpetrators of intimate intra-community violence often rationalized that violence by saying "that guy was a drug addict, he deserved it".

And the framing the researched provided was that the members of the community replicated the structural violence of their society within themselves and their own community against people who otherwise would have been their allies and highest esteemed peers.

That is the gaze. The replication of the desires, values, beliefs, and actions of others through the self as the self makes choices (both cognitive/internal and expressive/external), regardless of whether those choices are commensurate with the needs of the self.