gaze

verb

1. (intransitive)To stare intently or earnestly.

   “They gazed at the stars for hours.”

   “Why stand ye gazing up into heaven?”

   “Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in thought, gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see.”

   “She just sat there very straight, gazing across the moon-washed garden.”

   “In fact, for Antonioni this gazing is probably the most fundamental of all cognitive activities[.]”

2. (poetic, transitive)To stare at.

   “Strait toward Heav'n my wondring Eyes I turnd, / And gaz'd a while the ample Skie”

   “I searched for form and land For years and years I roamed I gazed a gazeless stare.”

noun

1. A fixed look; a look of eagerness, wonder, or admiration; a continued look of attention.

   “Captain Edward Carlisle, soldier as he was, martinet as he was, felt a curious sensation of helplessness seize upon him as he met her steady gaze, her alluring smile; he could not tell what this prisoner might do.”

2. (archaic)The object gazed on.

   “Those howers that with gentle worke did frame / The louely gaze where euery eye doth dwell.”

   “Made of my Enemies the ſcorn and gaze;”

3. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the relationship of the subject with the desire to look and awareness that one can be viewed.

   “She counters the tendency to focus on critical strategies of resisting the male gaze, raising the issue of the female spectator.”

4. (in-compounds, usually)The framework in which a subject is presented, determined by the biases of the creator and/or audience.

   “hooks is right to argue that within this culture the ethnographic conceit of a neutral gaze will always be a white gaze, an unmarked white gaze, one which passes its own perspective off as the omniscient”

   “The American panorama is indicative of the nation's expansion westward and an example of the American gaze.”