To my mind, what we need is not a “female” gaze, but a feminist one.
I have a confession: I’m getting sick of all the cultural conversation about “girlhood.”
Perhaps this is a bad position for a feminist to take in the mid-2020s. Perhaps it reveals too much about me and my own hang-ups. But then again, I’ve found myself taking many such positions in relation to U.S. popular culture lately. I preferred Oppenheimer to Barbie (by a large, large measure), and I especially hated America Ferrera’s didactic speech about how “impossible” it is to be a woman, which is full of fine, even accurate ideas, but makes zero sense in the film’s diegetic context or for the film’s characters. I find the idea of “girl math”—a meme premised on the idea that women can’t manage money or do math?—insulting. I do not eat “girl dinner” and object to the concept—you can keep your piles of almonds and three cubes of cheese.
Many of these cultural trends are silly, sometimes created by women, sometimes positioned as feminist, and often meant in good fun—even tongue in cheek. But I bristle at them anyway, in ways I sometimes struggle to articulate. What’s difficult about articulating my objection is that while memes about girlhood and girl dinner can seem patently unserious, to my eye—my gaze, if you will—they spark concern about what assumptions about gender they depend on and normalize.
So perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that I hate another instance of critical theory-adjacent online speak: the so-called “Female Gaze.”
The “female gaze” circulates as a phrase online—consider this TikTok (boasting over 300,000 likes) in which a user documents themselves “before dressing for the female gaze” and “after.” Or this one (over 800,000 likes) of a user “dancing for the female gaze.” Or this one, in which a man flips pancakes while showcasing his “outfits for the female gaze.”
Across these posts, a certain set of patterns appears: most often, that some real women’s clothes, makeup, or faces and bodies (as in the discourse of “girl pretty” versus “boy pretty”) are designated as being “for the male gaze” and others as “for the female gaze.” (Not incidentally, “girl pretty” or “for the female gaze” often correlate to whiteness, specifically white femininity.) To “dress for the male gaze,” you might wear revealing clothing, look sexy and sultry (or, alternatively, angelic and doll-like). To “dress for the female gaze,” you might look cute or “soft,” dress quirky or in baggy clothing, sport “clean girl makeup.” Or, if you’re a man and you want to be “for the female gaze” or seem “written by a woman,” you might model yourself after Little Women’s Laurie Laurence or Fleabag’s hot priest, or ape the fashion sense and vibes of, say, Logan Lerman or Harry Styles. Some TV shows and movies are “for the female gaze”—and sometimes, all that means is “written or directed by a woman or femme.” Some shows and movies (think The Sopranos or Scorsese) are “too male” or “too male gaze-y”—and so, whatever their merits, they are just not for women. (Although, who decided men get to own Scorsese’s oeuvre anyway?)
In other words: male gaze = bad, female gaze = good. It’s “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” reheated for the TikTok set.
When I see these posts online (and I don’t even have TikTok, if you’d believe it), when my students reference them in class, when I read yet another thinkpiece about a digital trend, I, like Carrie Bradshaw, can’t help but wonder: what about power? By which I mean: what political conditions create the environment where such posts can thrive, to the tune of thousands and millions of views and shares?
These posts do not see gender as about power, but instead as a set of rigid, binary categories. Even as they point (however obliquely) to the fact of gender as performative, something one does rather than is, I would not blame you if you came away from them thinking of gender as a fact rather than a construction. This discourse mobilizes essentializing conceptions of what “female” means; indeed, what I want to argue in this essay is that the operative word in the term as used in popular discourse is not “gaze” but “female.” Thus, I see “female gaze”—like “girl dinner” and “girl math”—as a part of a rising tide of popular discourses premised on gender essentialist ideas about women and femininity.
The idea of the “male gaze” originates in Laura Mulvey’s canonical 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she outlines how “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female,” and in cinema, “women are simultaneously looked at and displayed” such that their appearance “connote[s] to-be-looked-at-ness.” All too often, uptakes of Mulvey’s term neglect her argument’s grounding not only in psychoanalysis, but also in cinematic form and mechanisms specifically. Mulvey’s essay is also a product of its own political and academic moment, based in the second-wave feminist thought of the 1970s. As “male gaze” circulates freely as memespeak, we lose what the term meant to signify.
Such conceptual drift has meant that what “male gaze” signals in colloquial conversation (online and off) is simply “women being objectified.” Consider, for example, critics who suggested that Coralie Fargeat’s body horror film The Substance replicated the male gaze because the film includes sequences mocking the overt objectification of women on film. Never mind that The Substance was written and directed by a woman attempting to satirize objectification, never mind that its extended sequences of Margaret Qualley gyrating for the camera take on a different meaning in the context of the film’s narrative. Common parlance offers no distinction between “the male gaze” and any representation of objectification in any context of those interpellated as women. Further, as the “dressing for the male gaze” versus “dressing for the female gaze” posts illuminate, the “male gaze” comes to connote not just objectification, but also, troublingly, instances where women express their sexuality.
In response to the proliferation of the “male gaze” as a synonym for the objectification (and sexuality) of women, it’s no surprise that content creators, everyday social media users, culture writers, and those in the media industries might turn to the idea of a “female gaze” in response. But, as Caetlin Benson-Allott has pointed out, the idea of the female gaze is only “haphazardly defined, more often by what it is not than by what it is.” The female gaze is not the male gaze; but what is it?
As Lauren Michele Jackson has argued, contemporary uses of the idea of the gaze (from “female gaze” to “white gaze” to “straight gaze”) are “more invested in matters of identity than in the project of aesthetic analysis. They want to name who is doing the looking rather than how.” “Who rather than how” reveals the crucial hinge of the discourse about the female gaze: what’s so “female” about it?
If we buy into the mobilization of the term on social media, in trade press and culture writing, and in usage by filmmakers, we have a few possible answers. The female gaze is soft, it’s sensitive, it’s empathetic, it’s not objectifying, it’s emotional, it represents female desire or women’s concerns.
All of this is well and good, I suppose. After all, who doesn’t like softness and empathy? I’m a woman; I love to have my concerns represented.
But in fact, it is my desire to have my concerns represented that produces the trouble I have with the term “female gaze.” The equation of “female” with soft, emotional, vulnerable, sensitive, gentle, or whatever other terms get tagged on to the “female gaze” starts to sound a lot like old-school patriarchal rhetoric. Men are violent, women are gentle! Men are strong, women are sensitive! Men are rational, women are emotional!
I love being a woman, but growing up, I often felt slightly ajar of how I “ought” to be. Though I am cis and visibly feminine, I was often told, directly or indirectly, by both authority figures and peers, that I was too loud, too bossy, too assertive, too opinionated, too strong, too whatever to be an “ideal woman.” (Don’t I sound a bit like America Ferrera in Barbie? Sigh.) Even such minor deviations from the normative ideal felt inadmissible.
I felt the strictures of binary, essentialist visions of gender keenly, even as a cis, conventionally feminine woman. Even now, I brace at many invocations (even from other women!) of the idea that “women are like [xyz]” or “as women, we [abc].” I’m known for only-half-jokingly responding with “not all women.” In part, because all too often, I don’t resonate with [xyz] or [abc]. Though such gestures are often intended toward collectivity, their impulse to totalize experience can impede that same collectivity—at least when they depend upon sameness of expression instead of similarity of position or solidarity across difference.
I do not want to undercut the value of the moments and spaces in which people of marginalized gender positions articulate the contours of their marginalization. I have had countless experiences in which such conversations crystallized and clarified my own life experiences. My objection is not with the impulse toward articulation, but rather with articulations that depoliticize (“girl”) and essentialize (“female”) the very experience of political subjugation that spurred us to articulation in the first place.
And, like Jackson, I am a lot more interested in the “how” than the “who.” If what’s “female” about the “female gaze” is gender essentialist prescriptions of what “women” like and are like, then I don’t want it.
The collective experiences of people of marginalized gender positions are a basis for a politics that seeks our collective liberation. But one need only to look at the world around us to recognize that, just like men, women have great capacity for harm, violence, and evil. To deny this is to refuse to see the many women who actively choose collaboration with white supremacist patriarchy over solidarity with people of marginalized gender positions.
At a smaller scale, women can be angry, petty, loud, rude, commanding—and thank goodness for that! To deny this is to boomerang back around to a deeply conservative and essentialist vision of gender wherein women are only and always pure and virtuous. It is to deny the full range of experience for those who occupy the category “woman,” as well as to deny the presence and perspectives of the many people who land outside that category.
Further, in the time of strategic representation, it is especially dangerous to imagine that women are our allies simply because they are women—and similarly dangerous to imagine that men are our enemies simply because they are men. To do so is to do the work of transphobes, gender essentialists, and fascists for them. If you don’t believe me, try Judith Butler.
To my mind, what we need is not a “female” gaze, but a feminist one. The strategic essentialism of the female gaze costs us more than it gains us. It has little space for trans and nonbinary people; it barely even has space for women who are “boy pretty” or too assertive or too sexual or too loud. At the very moment when tides of oppression against people of all marginalized genders at the local, state, federal, and global levels are rising, we ought to be troubling the categories of “female” and “woman” to unseat their assumptions—not anxiously shoring them up.
Olivia Stowell is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, where her dissertation project examines race, gender, and labor in contemporary reality TV. She loves iced coffee, cupcakes with sprinkles, millennial pink, and the film Notting Hill.
Thumbnail photo by Vinicius ‘Amn’ Amano via Unsplash