PhD Top Stories

Davide Belgradi

Voyeurism in twentieth-century Italian literature

Doctoral Programme in Studi Linguistici e Letterari (Università di Trieste e Università di Udine)

In a common-sense, ‘voyeurism’ is the practice of a ‘voyeur’, someone who, unseen, peeps at one or more naked people, even during a sexual intercourse and in order to reach jouissance. In other words, a voyeur is affected by a sexual perversion, and his observation aims to achieve pleasure. But what if there were more to voyeurism than a simple perversion? And what if literature could make it possible to reflect on other types of voyeurism? Actually, redefining the concept of voyeurism is possible, and that rethinking shows deeper and at first undetectable meanings. To do that it one must first question some assumptions. Is there always an observer behind a gaze? According to common sense and the clinical categorizations, an observer and an observed are the minimum requirements for voyeurism to be in place. However, as Bentham shows in his Panopticon (1979), later rethought by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975), a voyeuristic gaze doesn’t require necessarily a voyeur, as long as the observer acts by assuming his presence. While we are talking, during an on-line meeting, if our interlocutor shuts down their webcam and microphone, we can’t be sure that they are still watching at us. However, that’s enough for us to presume their presence and feel restricted in our freedom, and to be forced to continue our speech as if they were still there.

Is the voyeuristic gaze always eroticized? The practice of seeing without being seen and of seeing to be seen is not always related to sexuality. If the gaze puts a power structure on the observer, paying attention to all these meanings makes us capable to underline much deeper dynamics. Following Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943), it’s just when a subject ‘feels’ seen by an observer that they become aware of the existence of an Other, and after that discovery they change the very idea of subjectivity which has guided them until then. The impact of a voyeuristic gaze on a subject who feels, finds or sees themselves observed can be significant. According to Sartre, the two most common emotions that this gaze can cause are fear and shame. But what is exactly shameful in someone suffering from being voyeurized? In his Cosmicomics’ short story The Light-Years (1965), Italo Calvino imagines a voyeur-character who, during one of his observations, spots a sign with the sentence «I SAW YOU» in a galaxy a million light-years away. In its development, the text suggests that a voyeuristic gaze can trigger a sense of shame because, following Sartre, when the Other sees us and consumes our external image, it condemns us to come to terms with the idea of us it will have after having seen us. We won’t feel any shame in peeping through a keyhole at what's behind the door, but we surely would if we would notice, in that moment, someone who is standing behind us looking at us. In short, as Calvino’s character shows, that voyeuristic gaze will condemn us to abandon our ‘for-itself’ and embrace our ‘being-for-others’.

Likewise in The Adventure of a Bather, a short story included in Calvino's book Difficult Loves (1970), we find a discussion around the junction between voyeuristic gaze and shame. In this case, however, the protagonist is a woman who finds out she has lost her swimsuit during a bath in the sea. Because of this, her experience of shame starts by consciousness of her ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (as expressed by Laura Mulvey). More specifically, the short story shows how the woman is capable of feeling seen in her nudity due to an internalized structural gaze, even if she is the only one knowing her secret in that very moment. This happens because, quoting John Berger (Ways of seeing, 1972): «Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at». In other terms, the character’s interiorized female-overseer replicates on her a gaze built on a patriarchal power structure. This study, like the whole PhD project from which it is extrapolated, aims to identify some specific declinations of voyeurism, in the belief that literature has the means to rethink the gaze, and even to disarm, sometimes, the intimate eye’s violence.

Authors and affiliations

Davide Belgradi¹,

Contact

Davide Belgradi, email: belgradi.davide@spes.uniud.it

Reference

Davide Belgradi
“«TI HO VISTO»: la vergogna di vedersi visti a partire da due racconti di Italo Calvino”
Comparatismi #8 - (2023 – Forthcoming)