Female gaze
The female gaze is a feminist theory term referring to the gaze of the female spectator, character or director of an artistic work, but more than the gender it is an issue of representing women as subjects having agency. As such, people of any gender can create films with a female gaze. It is a response to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey's term "the male gaze", which represents not only the gaze of a heterosexual male viewer but also the gaze of the male character and the male creator of the film. In that sense it is close, though different, from the Matrixial gaze coined in 1985 by Bracha L. Ettinger. In contemporary usage, the female gaze has been used to refer to the perspective a female filmmaker brings to a film that might be different from a male view of the subject.
History
Mulvey discussed aspects of voyeurism and fetishism in the male gaze in her article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". She drew from Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film, Rear Window, applying terms from Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis to discuss camera angle, narrative choice, and props in the movie while focusing on the concept of the male gaze. From what Jeffries, the protagonist in Rear Window, looks at through his camera to the camera angles in his discussion with his girlfriend, the male gaze is accentuated by each move in Mulvey's article. Mulvey's article focused on the concept of "scopophilia", or a pleasure in gazing and placed women as spectacles to be objectified and viewed, unable to return a gaze. She ultimately rejects most depictions of women in film as inadequate representations of human beings.Theoretical implementation
The female gaze looks at three viewpoints: the individual who is filming, the characters within the film, and the spectator. These three viewpoints also are part of Mulvey's male gaze, but for the female gaze the focus is on women instead of men. Viewpoints expanded alongside diversity in film genres. Woman's films were a genre that focused on female leads, showing the female as a diegetic story-teller rather than as a spectacle. Movies such as Rebecca and Stella Dallas are examples of such films in which the traditional narrative is told through the female protagonist. This genre of film evolved into "chick flicks" such as 27 Dresses and The Devil Wears Prada. These films are meant to represent the desires of female protagonists and, therefore, to represent the desires of the female movie-viewer.Zoe Dirse looked at the female gaze through the documentary film genre, analyzing aspects of pleasure and viewer identification. She analyzes the gaze at the points of production and reception. She notes that if the cinematographer is female and the subject is also female, the object of the film takes on a different role. Dirse argues that having a female cinematographer allows women to be viewed as they really are and not as the voyeuristic spectacle that the male gaze makes them out to be. While filming in Cairo, Dirse was in a crowd and observed being noticed by the men around her. At first they seemed curious, and Dirse wondered if it was because of her gender or the fact that she had a camera. It was not long before they began to push past her, and she felt a sense of danger that she felt other women in Cairo shared. This is depicted in her film, Shadow Maker. She said that her gender allowed her to be an unobtrusive observer – unlike a man – when filming Romani women singing.
Paula Marantz Cohen discusses the female gaze in the chick flick genre, with specific attention to the attire women wear. According to her, spectacle overrules plot in films such as The Awful Truth. Irene Dunne's wardrobe is regarded as a central aspect of the film. According to Cohen, the different dresses that Dunne wears are extravagant, but not sexualized. While the clothing may be regarded as comical, it is also supportive to Dunne's independence and femininity. Cohen notes that in the film The Wedding Planner, Jennifer Lopez is fully clothed throughout the entire film. The clothes, as in The Awful Truth, are regarded as comical yet they catch the viewer's eye without sexualizing. Cohen also analyzes the relationship between the female lead stars of these films and their male co-stars. She states that these films truly depict what women want, that they are accentualized in a positive manner and have a partner who amplifies this accentuation.
Contemporary usage
Critics have focused attention on the presence of the female gaze in cinema and television, in works such as The Handmaid's Tale, I Love Dick, Fleabag, and The Love Witch.The controversial lesbian drama film Blue Is the Warmest Colour received considerable critical comment for the dominance of the male gaze and lack of female gaze, with some reviewers calling it a "patriarchal gaze". Jul Maroh, the author of the book upon which the film was based, was among the harshest critics, saying, "It appears to me this was what was missing on the set: lesbians."
Filmmaker April Mullen has said, "Women have this vulnerability and connection to a depth of emotions that I can see and feel in certain moments of truth in the films we create. To me, the female gaze is transparency – the veil between audience and filmmaker is thin, and that allows people in more."
Art historian Griselda Pollock and film theorist Julian Albilla worked with Bracha L. Ettinger's concepts of matrixial gaze, eros, and witnessing to analyse the feminine gaze in the films of Chantal Akerman and Pedro Almodóvar.
At the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, Joey Soloway, in their keynote address, explored the definition of the female gaze in film-making. Specifically, Soloway outlined three concepts, mimicking Laura Mulvey's original triangulation of the male gaze. Soloway's conception of the female gaze goes beyond a mere inversion of Mulvey's male gaze, however, and instead imagines the ways in which the female gaze in filmmaking can provide insight into the lived female experience. Their concept includes "the feeling camera" ; "the gazed gaze," which shows viewers how it feels to be the object of the gaze; and "returning the gaze".
Similar to the concept of the female gaze, 'written by a woman' can be understood as an emotionally vulnerable and aware man devoid of the conventions of toxic masculinity. Popularized on TikTok, this kind of man is in touch with his emotions, thoughtful, considerate, and kind, unafraid to distance themselves from the stereotypical concepts of masculinity. This kind of man is the idealized and embodiment of a man as conventionalized by what a woman would want in a man rather than what men believe women will want.
Application in film and media
American writer and director Joey Soloway has addressed additional components of the female gaze in film and media. In their 2016 Toronto International Film Festival Masterclass, Soloway outlined three key concepts in their theory of the female gaze: "feeling seeing," "the gazed gaze," and "returning the gaze." These three key concepts can be easily contrasted with the three looks of Laura Mulvey's Gaze. In film and media, 'feeling seeing' refers to a process of filmmaking that makes the camera subjective. The 'gazed gaze' creates the perspective of being "in" rather than overlooking the character's experiences, allowing the audience to understand the character's inner thoughts, feelings, and emotions. The television show Fleabag utilizes this trope through direct eye contact with the camera lens. In Fleabag, written and directed by Phoebe-Waller Bridge, the unnamed protagonist breaks the Fourth wall during moments when she is not revealing the full extent of her beliefs or emotions to other characters within the show, instead relaying her inner thoughts, feelings, and emotions to the audience through eye contact directly in the camera lens – as Markus Kügle already explained in more detail.The 'gazed gaze' refers to a connection with the audience, aimed at conveying the ideal conceptions of being desired and as the object of one's affection. The 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright, displays this concept during a scene in which the protagonist, Mr. Darcy, admits timidly with hesitance to Elizabeth Bennet his captivation and affection for her in a manner that is contrary to the grandeur professions of love seen in the romance genre. During his declaration of love, the camera's angle makes the viewer appear as the subject of Mr. Darcy's love confession. The direct camera angle allows the audience to know what it may feel like to be the object of his gaze.
To address the rise of rejecting and returning the gaze in film and media Joey Soloway conceptualized 'returning the gaze,' this refers to switching the roles between the audience and the subject of objectification within the film. The gaze is shared between the objectified and objectified through which the character realizes their role, rejecting it or returning to the viewer. Depicted in writer and director Greta Gerwig's Barbie, the film follows Margot Robbie's Barbie as she becomes sentient, leaving Barbieland to go to the 'real world,' where she experiences for the first time the patriarchy and sexual objectification. In the film, Margot Robbie's Barbie realizes the full extent of what it means to be seen as an object and the implications of living in a patriarchal society, something absent in the utopia of Barbieland. During a scene when Barbie is crying after realizing the full extent of what it means to live in a patriarchal world, the narrator breaks the fourth wall by addressing how, during this scene of vulnerability and defeat experienced by Barbie, the audience instead readily acknowledges how beautiful Margot Robbie looks while crying before they will recognize her character's feelings. Rejecting, or similarly recognizing, the audience will acknowledge her beauty before empathizing with her struggles as a woman through the verbal assertion made by the film's narrator.