You’ve likely heard of the male gaze, the concept coined by British film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In her writing, she notes that the “male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.”
But what about its opposite, the female gaze? The term means more than just “everything in the male gaze, but for women”—and it’s important to understand its complexity as it becomes more prominent in modern-day criticism and art. Let’s dive in.
JUMP TO
The female gaze focuses on wholly realized women found onscreen—particularly in ways they are not afforded by society, the patriarchy, and the male gaze. This means viewing women less as sex objects and trophies for another character to “win,” but rather as fully expressed, complicated, and autonomous people. (Hopefully, this also means they are protagonists in their own stories.)
As critic and Turner Classic Movies host Alicia Malone states in her book, “The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women,” the female gaze essentially begs the question: “What happens…when we look at the world from a female point of view? How do women see themselves? How do women see other women? What makes a movie essentially feminine? What can audiences, of any gender identification, gain by looking at film through a female lens?”
What Is the Bechdel Test? In their 2016 TIFF Master Class, writer-director Joey Soloway (“Transparent,” “I Love Dick”) outlined three key concepts in their theory of the female gaze: feeling seeing, the gazed gaze, and returning the gaze.
Feeling seeing occurs when the camera is subjective, and the filmmaker creates a feeling of being “in” the character’s emotions and thoughts, rather than just observing from the outside.
The gazed gaze is creating a sense of connection with the audience, making us (the viewer) understand how it feels to be looked at.
Returning the gaze is a subversion of roles, rejecting the notion of a female onscreen as an object. It is the act of dividing the aspects of desire equally between the audience and the characters.
Soloway’s three concepts craft an idea of the female gaze as something inherently vulnerable, personal, and subversive—both for the watcher and the watched. Ginette Vincendeau, a professor of film studies at King’s College London, similarly says “the reciprocity of the female gaze” is “more of an equal power relation between the person depicted and the person depicting, which is to me a feminist gesture.”
This theory, however, relies on the emotional environment created by the director. Therefore, the underrepresentation of women behind the camera in film and television limits the application of these main principles.
Actor vs. Actress A 2023 study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that a list of the 1,600 top-grossing movies from 2007 to 2022 only featured 88 female directors. Of the top-grossing films of 2023, the overall percentage of women in speaking roles was 35% (down from 37% in 2022), and the percentage of movies with female protagonists was 28% (down from 33% in 2022).
In television, the 2023 Boxed In report revealed that “females accounted for 45% of all speaking characters on original streaming programs and 44% on broadcast network programs. Both of these percentages represent a retreat from slightly higher numbers in 2021–22. The percentage of women working in behind-the-scenes roles also declined from 37% in 2021–22 to 34% in 2022–23 on original streaming programs, and from 31% in 2021–22 to 29% in 2022–23 on broadcast network programs.”
So, it goes without saying that the impact and influence of the female gaze has nowhere near the same footing that the male gaze does in society and culture. That said, there are fantastic examples that show off the essential features of the female gaze—particularly its inherently subversive nature. Series like “The L Word,” “Fleabag,” “Insecure,” and “I Love Dick” all stand alone with their singular, often groundbreaking work on putting feminine struggles and desires front and center.
We would be remiss to not touch on the female gaze as it relates to sex, given how much of the male gaze is defined by it. The primary difference—and, arguably, the reason it is equally, if not more, erotic—is that the female gaze eroticizes the characters’ feelings rather than their bodies. We see this particularly on Soloway’s “I Love Dick,” where we hear pages and pages of unsent, sexually explicit letters narrated by struggling artist Chris (Kathryn Hahn), who accompanies her husband, Sylvère (Griffin Dunne), to Marfa, Texas, for his research fellowship and quickly becomes infatuated with his fellowship sponsor, Dick (Kevin Bacon).
Similarly to the male gaze, criticism of the female gaze lands heavily in the overt sexualization and depersonalization of intimate partners, as well as the often over-represented nature of straight, white, cis women in the discourse around it. When Showtime’s “The L Word” was released, for example, some critics levied the claim that it parroted the male gaze in how it was shot, creating an inherently voyeuristic look at sex and female bodies. (To say nothing of the harmful misinformation the show bandied about regarding trans people or the tokenization of people of color.)
Others believe that, due to the inherently dominant nature of the male gaze, the female gaze cannot exist because, as Zoe Le Marinel put it, “women do not dominate and control the media.”
Grappling with the female gaze
Be you an actor, writer, or director, it’s hard not to wonder how the female gaze has affected (or will affect) your storytelling and/or a performance. How do you grapple with the inequality at play while also ensuring your story does not fall into tropes and traps?
Perhaps the most important part is exposure and curiosity. In short: Watch more films by/for/about women, and take the time to regularly examine your own artistic impulses around how you look at and frame your characters. Sure, Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” movie is a master class in creating a blockbuster with feminist ideals (even if they are at their most basic)—but it is just one example in a sea of many, many other nuanced portraits.
12 Female Filmmakers Shaping the Future of Cinema How about Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”? Or even Chloé Zhao’s “The Rider,” which doesn’t even have a female protagonist but employs the tenets described above to craft a richly, emotionally vulnerable look at one of the most masculine sports in the world? Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” is—according to the Criterion Channel—a “rapturous vision of Black womanhood and vanishing ways of life in the turn-of-the-century South” and the first-ever film directed by an African American woman to receive wide release in the United States.
In the end, we would all do well to lean into both curiosity and skepticism about how and why we do what we do—be it on the page or screen. When we deep-dive into our influences and how things like the representation of men and women (and everyone in between) onscreen have impacted our own choices and biases, everybody wins. Characters are more nuanced, shots are more interesting, and visual language becomes a deeper well of originality. And that only makes our art better.
