Notes on Looking: Beyond the Female Gaze

Originally published in Burning Magazine, Special Edition. 

In 2013, I was among the Tumblr-dwelling twenty-somethings captivated by emerging artists like Petra Collins, Tavi Gevinson, and Monika Mogi – each offering their own vision of what felt like liberation from what Laura Mulvey had diagnosed decades earlier as the male gaze, that suffocating paradigm where women existed on screen as elaborate props in men's narratives. The appeal was instant: here was a aesthetic revolution transmitted through Rookie Magazine spreads and Tumblr feeds, suggesting that if we could just get enough women behind cameras, we might finally see ourselves clearly.

How perfectly characteristic of that era's feminist optimism that I, like so many others, believed breaking free of patriarchal vision could be achieved through an Instagram filter palette of pastels and lens flares. I developed a sort of checklist for identifying the female gaze: first, a woman photographer; second, that ineffable quality that somehow screamed 'by us, for us' – usually through a hazy combination of adjectives like 'soft' and 'tender' and that peculiarly millennial phrase 'sensual but not sexual.' It's embarrassing now to recognize how I confused aesthetic with liberation, as if patriarchy could be overthrown by switching from sharp focus to soft.

The evolution of the female gaze from feminist theory to social media hashtag perfectly exemplifies how the internet metabolizes radical ideas into marketable aesthetics. On TikTok, #femalegaze has become less a challenge to patriarchal viewing patterns than a preset collection of visual tropes – a way of filming yourself that suggests authenticity while adhering to an increasingly rigid set of parameters. We've replaced one prescriptive way of seeing with another, turning what began as resistance into a set of equally constraining rules about how women should look, move, and present themselves. The Sofia Coppola-ification of feminine experience, beautiful as it can be, has become its own kind of prison.

When Shiori asked me to contribute to this issue, I found myself paralyzed by these contradictions. How do you photograph women without either objectifying them or sanctifying them? My solution was to retreat from declaration to observation. The images I submitted – portraits and photographs of nude sculptures from my archive – aren't meant to be a manifesto about female vision. They're simply documents of how one woman sees, in a world where seeing itself has become ideologically charged. I've started using 'female perspective' instead of 'female gaze,' not because it's perfect, but because it feels more honest about its limitations. It suggests something personal rather than universal, a way of looking that doesn't pretend to speak for an entire gender or promise liberation through aesthetics alone.

January 3rd, 2025