another academic paper :)

This is another academic paper I found about scrutinizing the male gaze, and links directly to CSI. this paper was actually 13 pages but I have tried to cut it down as much as possible to keep it relevant to female representation in CSI

Scrutinizing the Male Gaze
Mulvey (1975), in her paradigm-setting piece, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” argues that the concept of the male gaze refers to three things: 1) camera position and angles that frame a scene voyeuristically, 2) the actual gaze of male characters when it objectifies female characters and 3) the gaze of the audience when it replicates either the camera’s voyeuristic gaze or male characters’ objectifying gaze.
Mulvey (1989) also asserts that the gaze’s frame of reference is the heterosexual, male experience around which the dominant society is normed. She argues that individual audience members, regardless their sex, view filmed performances through both the camera’s heterosexual, male “eye” and male characters’ perceptions of women. Hence, film and television socialize the audience into the male gaze and in so doing perpetuate hegemonic, patriarchal cultural notions of gender.

For example, in the first five seasons of CSI: Las Vegas, the “number one scripted series in the Nielsen ratings for three years running,” female characters consistently are objectified by the male gaze even as they are shown successfully occupying non-traditional roles for women (“CSI summary,” n.d.). The show’s popularity ensures that this bifurcated but ultimately misogynist representation of women circulates widely. Because the media play a critical role in shaping audiences’ behavior, identity, and values, this representation also informs beliefs about women’s social roles (Carilli, 2005; Del Negro, 2005; Dow, 1992; Heide, 1995; Meyers, 1999; Mulvey, 1975; Signorielli, 1997).

Crime Scene Investigation
As it narrates the team’s stories CSI: Las Vegas also portrays the gendered hierarchy that has emerged in the workplace since the mid-twentieth century when the number of middle- and upper-class white women who work outside the home increased substantially.
In 2003, women made up 47% of the total U.S. workforce (McBride-Stetson, 2004, p. 239). However, they held only 19% of the science, engineering and technology posts in the U.S. (Thom, 2001, p. 171).
Significantly, in CSI: Las Vegas self-determined women frequently are portrayed as fractured if not atomized under the male gaze. Sara and Catherine are among the show’s broken women. Their commitment to forensic science and their jobs is represented in ambivalent terms: Sara and Catherine are depicted as empowered and authoritative but also lacking, which is consistent with patriarchal assessments of women who are successful in nontraditional endeavors. Moreover, Sara and Catherine, because they resist patriarchal norms by performing a “man’s” job, are subject to a persistently invasive voyeurism—the women’s private lives become the focus of public scrutiny—that discourages similar career choices among female audience members.

Under the Microscope: The Female Body Atomized
In comparison to actual crime statistics a disproportionate number of CSI: Las Vegas’ victims are women who, regardless the nature of their work, act with a great deal of agency. But more often than not images of these women are atomized under the scrutiny of the male gaze. This is exemplified in Episode 93, “Viva Las Vegas,” which opens with the image of a bloodied woman lying on a hotel bed (on her back in her underwear). The male suspect is covered in blood but has no memory of murdering the woman.
Someone comments that the dead woman has swollen ankles. Catherine replies, “You ever tried shakin’ your ass in four-inch heels?” This hyper attenuated focus on the victim’s ankles is atomizing. It fractures the woman and splits her into disaggregated portions, reducing her to nothing more than a pair of implant-enhanced breasts, a “shakin’ ass” and misshapen ankles. Hence, here as in many other scenes, the female body is fragmented “into eroticized zones such as hair, face, legs, [and] breasts” (Roy, 2005, p. 4).
At the end of the scene a young woman walking down the hall in the doctor’s office contemptuously looks Catherine up and down. Catherine then stops to examine her image in a nearby mirror. She sees herself through the male gaze.
When these texts are juxtaposed they read like patriarchal urban legends. “Don’t stay single”–you will end up dead and naked in a hotel room somewhere. “Don’t age”–no man wants an old, wrinkled, flaccid woman.
Furthermore, when the camera casts its gaze on the “Viva Las Vegas” stripper’s breasts, ass, and feet it estranges her from her body which in turn socializes female members of the audience into similarly disassociated relationships with their bodies. Overall, in these types of shots women are portrayed as dissembled, objectified body parts rather than integrated subjects with a strong sense of their own personhood. Hence, if taken together, these scenes demonstrate Meyers’ (1999) contention that the “message may be that girls and women can be strong, smart, and independent as long as they remain within the confines of their homes and relationships while also maintaining traditional standards of feminine beauty” (p. 6).

The Different Faces of Power
Historically women as a group have had limited access to public power, especially in political and economic spheres. When women finally began to enter these domains they encountered obstacles preventing them from attaining power. Some of the most difficult challenges women must overcome are reactionary representations of female leaders that suggest they are “asexual,” whores, or dominatrixes (Jamieson, 1995, p. 72). These negative stereotypes are deployed with particular intensity in fields where the glass ceiling remains firmly intact and leadership continues to be predominantly male.
CSI: Las Vegas, a popular, powerful series, could encourage girls and young adults to pursue education and careers in STEM by showing female scientists in a positive light. It occasionally does. For example, in Episode 102, “No Human Involved,” Sara praises a teenage girl, Glynnis, for studying science and encourages Glynnis’ interest in quantum theory:

Sara: You like chemistry?
Glynnis: No. I’m not smart enough.
Sara: Sure you are. Glynnis, right? (Glynnis nods. Sara looks at the cover of her textbook.) Quantum theory. That’s compelling stuff actually.

However, for the most part the show portrays female scientists as either deploying patriarchal values in their relationships with other women, which are strained by animosity and competition, or lacking happy, fulfilling personal lives because of their jobs. Typically, for example, Sara and Catherine look at other female scientists through the lens of the male gaze, condemning rather than supporting female co-workers. Thus, the female scientists of CSI: Las Vegas conform to patriarchal mores just as do many non-fictional women.

Women’s Personal Lives in the Public Spotlight
In another episode the mother of a girl who was used to harvest organs for her older brother flings the ultimate insult at Catherine. The mother, who perpetrated the crime against the girl, attacks Catherine’s parenting skills. She asks, “So what kind of mother are you? When do you see her? You work nights. You probably don’t even know where she is half the time. Alicia’s life may not have been simple, but at least I knew her. Can you say the same?” Clearly this scene and others in which Catherine’s parenting skills are criticized suggest that she is unable to manage both a job and her family. These scenes’ common theme is that Catherine’s commitment to her work outside the home prevents her from being a good mother. Catherine, CSI: Las Vegas implies, cannot be both a first-rate scientist and a successful mother.
Catherine’s romantic relationships also are subject to public scrutiny and they tend to show her drawn to men who are abusive or emotionally and psychologically unavailable. However, rather than portraying this as the men’s flaw CSI: Las Vegas faults Catherine. This is evident when the audience meets her low-life ex-husband, a creepy guy she kisses in a bar parking lot in Episode 114 and when Catherine briefly dates a trashy club manager in Episode 93. Neither relationship is healthy and both end disastrously. At the end of Episode 93, for example, the manager breaks Catherine’s heart when she shows up unannounced at his club and catches him having sex with a younger woman. Instead of apologizing or expressing remorse the manager arrogantly defends himself: “What do you expect? I run a nightclub.” Catherine walks out without saying a word. Her silence speaks volumes. It suggests that she has a defeatist attitude and hints that she fears using an empowered voice to “talk back” to disrespectful, abusive male lovers. Therefore, Catherine’s silence signals that she acquiesces to rather than resists the male gaze’s voyeurism.

Conflict of Interests: What do we do with all of this?
CSI: Las Vegas is entertaining and features strong women occupying jobs that they would not have held a generation ago if it were not for feminist social change initiatives. Nevertheless, the show’s female characters struggle with the types of challenges that many non-fictional women face, such as difficult relationships with men, heavy workloads in and outside the home, and raising children as single parents. But CSI: Las Vegas also deploys patriarchal ideologies that limit women by encompassing them within the male gaze. No matter how strong, independent, and successful these women are portrayed they inevitably are objectified by the male gaze, which is dehumanizing:
Objectification does not simply mean that someone is the object or aim of your sexual desire. Rather, it is a systemic process whereby a sentient being is dehumanized, reduced to a thing, a being without social significance or stature, someone turned into something that can be exchanged, bartered, owned, shown off, kept, used, abused, and disposed of. (Caputi, 1999, p. 67)
Such CSI-style, patriarchal representations of women will continue to circulate in the media unless we can craft an alternative schema for narrating women’s life experiences that does not atomize them or put their private lives under the microscope for all to see (Fara 2004)