The Female Gaze

By Jan Suzukawa

What is the female gaze and why is it important?

 

Arts, entertainment, and culture have been defined through the male gaze for centuries. But things are rapidly changing. The question is not whether society is ready, but whether women themselves are ready to fully express what they see through their gaze - their unique perspective as women.

 

The Female Gaze discusses how the female gaze differs from the male gaze in books and movies such as Star Wars, Fifty Shades of Grey, Nomadland, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Emily the Criminal, and The Woman King, and also examines slash, Japanese yaoi, and m/m romance as alternatives to traditional heteronormative romance stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bell River Publishing
• Release date: Apr 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224826513

Book preview

Dedication

I did a presentation called The Female Gaze at Yaoi Con 2015 in Burlingame, California. The reception from the audience showed me that these ideas meant a lot to them, as much as they did to me.

This little book is dedicated to everyone who attended the presentation that day, with much appreciation.

Introduction

It’s the spring of 1977 in Southern California. I am a teenage girl, glasses-wearing, a nerd before the word was invented, into science fiction and dreaming of being a writer someday.

I don’t recall exactly how it happened. There was no internet in those days, no personal computers, tablets, smartphones, or cell phones. The TV only had 13 channels: three national and the rest local to one’s area. And there were two daily newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and the L.A. Herald Examiner.

But somehow word gets around that there is an amazing movie that is about to come out. It’s called Star Wars and it doesn’t feature any actor that anyone has ever heard of, but it’s supposed to be the coolest science-fiction movie ever.

So I go to see it. The theater is packed. When that huge triangular spaceship rumbled overhead in the first few minutes, a huge aaahh went through the audience. No one had ever seen anything like this before.

Something else that no one ever saw before was Leia. Yes, she was a princess and a senator, but she was much more than that.

I loved Carrie Fisher’s low-pitched voice and sarcastic tone, her incredulous looks directed at Han, and her seizing the initiative—remember how she grabbed the weapon and fired at the jail guards? Followed by blasting an opening to the garbage chute?

She didn’t meekly follow—she took charge when needed. She talked back to men. She was a revelation. And like every Star Wars fan I was devastated when I heard that she’d died. I felt like a piece of my early feminist soul was gone.

This was the 1970s. The Women’s Movement was having its big moment on the stage of American politics and American life. I thought that Leia marked the beginning of a new era in Hollywood movies and television; that stories I would be able to relate to would now appear in abundance.

Well... yes and no. It’s been almost fifty years since then. And there are definitely more stories with women protagonists who are self-actualized—or who become self-actualized by the end of the movie—and empowered.

But something is still missing. Life is about more than self-actualization and empowerment, as important as those things are, and stories from a woman’s point of view that neglect the desire angle seem somehow... lacking.

I’m referring to romantic and sexual desire, yes, but more than that. Women have the same driving need as men to live their lives out loud, in color, with preferences that don’t need justifying, and some of that is definitely related to intimate relationships.

What I’m talking about, however, is more of a full-on 360 degree perspective. The female gaze, a woman’s view on the world, encompasses not only physical desire but desire regarding everything.

This little book is about that missing piece in arts and entertainment and in the larger view—society. What is the female gaze and why should we care? Does it really matter?

It matters because the point of view of half the population matters, and also because the expansion of stories that could be told would add to the total picture of who we are as a society, as a culture. It’s a missing piece sort of thing. Actually, it’s a lot of missing pieces when you think about it.

Do we only create stories based on what we see, on what already exists? Or do we create from the whole cloth in our own minds, thus adding something new to the culture we live in? If we only create based on the limits of what already exists nothing will change.

This is not an academic work. I’m not an academic, just someone who has thought about these issues for years and wanted to start a public conversation about them.

I was a huge anime fan from 2005 to 2020 and paid little attention to Hollywood movies and television in those years. When I began to watch American entertainment again I saw the changes that had taken place. It’s a landscape that is more inclusive now and it continues to evolve, which I think is awesome.

A lot has changed since I sat in a movie theater in 1977 and saw Star Wars for the first time. But I don’t follow entertainment news that closely, so what follows is simply my own opinion.

Finally, this is not a male-bashing book. It isn’t about men keeping women down or women as victims or anything like that.

Actually, it isn’t about men at all.