What is the female gaze?
The female gaze is a way of telling stories and showing bodies from a woman's point of view: it is interested in what desire feels like, not only in what is looked at. The term answers Laura Mulvey's "male gaze" of 1975. Its marks are attention to hands, glances and tension, and men who are shown being moved.
Male gaze and female gaze
Mulvey argued that classic cinema puts the viewer in the position of a man looking at a woman. The female gaze is not the same thing reversed. It does not simply display men. It shows the experience of wanting: the wait, the detail, the reaction on his face.
What it looks like
Viewers recognise it at once.
- The camera stays on a hand, a rolled sleeve, a look across a room.
- He is shown listening.
- Desire builds through restraint.
- She is a person with a point of view, and the scene is hers.
Why it matters here
Most AI companions were designed for men and then given a male face. Beau de Nuit is written from her side: the men are shown the way the female gaze shows men, attentive, a little undone, and seen through what they notice about her.
Questions and answers
- What does the female gaze mean?
- Depicting people, relationships and desire from a woman's perspective, with emphasis on feeling and subjectivity.
- Who coined the term male gaze?
- The film theorist Laura Mulvey, in her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema".
- Is the female gaze only in films made by women?
- No. It is a way of showing, and directors and writers of any gender can use it.