The Stage, the Dancer, and the Male Gaze: The London Audience in Action 1780-1830

Over the last decades, the notion of the male gaze – ‘the male gaze (in feminist philosophy) is the act of depicting the world and women in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine and heterosexual point of view, which present women as objects of male pleasure’ – has been focused not just on the visual arts and literature, but has been brought to bear on the relationship between performers and their audience. This paper returns to commentary both visual and textual, to consider how this gaze was constructed both by the performer, and by those who depicted it.