Putting an End to the Male vs. Female Gaze

Much has been written about the male vs. the female gaze in art—most commonly in film, photography, literature, and figurative visual art—as a framework to understand the way an artist depicts another person as well as the effect that that depiction has on the viewer. Historically, we consider the male gaze as one that empowers men while objectifying and subjugating women for men’s pleasure. The female gaze casts women more frequently as subjects (instead of objects) and, in cases when women do appear as objects of attention or desire, it imbues them with agency and autonomy.

But there’s a problem with this framework: it’s tied to the sex of the artist/storyteller. For example, I’ve read discussions about the female gaze that speak of women storytellers subverting the male gaze by objectifying the men in their stories as a way of taking back or flipping the narrative. I would argue that a simple role reversal—putting women behind the lens to subjugate men—does not change the nature of the gaze. Objectification, of anyone, is a quality of the male gaze.

To go deeper into this conversation, we need to be thoughtful about the language we use. The terms “male” and “female” don’t actually work because they relate to limited understandings of biological sex, which is immaterial. Far more relevant to this discourse are the notions of masculine and feminine approaches to art making, which anyone, regardless of sex or gender, can employ.

When we speak about the masculine and the feminine, we are speaking of universal forces that oppose and balance each other—much like yin and yang or Shiva and Shakti—and which exist in different iterations in cultures and mythologies throughout the world. The idea of a “male” or a “female” gaze propagates a false binary when, in fact, most artists use a mixture of masculine and feminine approaches to art making.

By embracing a framework that identifies masculine and feminine approaches, it opens us up to consider how each of these qualities can affect the different facets and stages of the art making process—from the conception of a work to its creation and, ultimately, its final presentation.

When I first started reviewing art, I was struck by the different ways that artists engage our attention. A more masculine final form offers the viewer something definitive and finite. I made this thing. Here you go. There’s a period at the end of the thought.

Left: Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons. Stainless steel (1994-2000) Right: Play-Doh by Jeff Koons (1994–2014) Aluminum.

Jeff Koons is, to my mind, the poster boy for this type of presentation:¹ Here’s a 12-foot-long stainless steel balloon dog! Here’s an 11-foot-high mash of Play-Doh that I paid other people to fabricate for me in aluminum! Here’s a billboard and some plastic sculptures depicting me and my wife fucking in lots of different positions!² Certainly his works are feats of scale and construction, but never is he attempting to have a conversation with us. Never is he receptive to our response.

Félix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross), 1991

By contrast, a feminine presentation (or final form) asks more questions than it provides answers. The thought can only be completed by the viewer. My favorite example of this is Untitled (Portrait of Ross) by Félix Gonzalez-Torres. At first glance it seems similar in presentation to Koons’s: a heap of individually wrapped pieces of candy piled in the corner of a gallery. Something shiny for us to look at, right? Except that, upon investigation of the piece, the viewer discovers that the pile of candy weighs exactly 175 pounds, which was the healthy ideal weight of the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, before he died of AIDS. The viewer is invited to take a piece of candy from the sculpture, thereby savoring the sweetness of Ross’s memory while, at the same time, causing the weight of the pile to diminish just as his body did while he was dying. And every night—or every few nights, depending on how many visitors come to the gallery—the museum staff re-weighs and replenishes the pile until it weighs 175 pounds again. So, by taking away a tiny piece of it, the viewer is also participating in a resurrection of sorts, a way to keep bringing back Ross’s memory.

I’d been thinking for a long time about the masculine vs. the feminine in regard to the final form that art takes. But it wasn’t until recently, when I watched the film The Lost Daughter, that I became interested in—or began to understand—the ways that the masculine and the feminine show up in the process of creating work.

The film itself—which you should watch it if you’re so inclined—is a revelation of the feminine gaze. The direction portrays each female character as both subject and object, and all are presented in a close, intimate, subjective style that is searching and elliptical and without straight answers.

After seeing the film, I wanted to learn everything I could about how it was made, and was moved by what I found. To begin at the beginning: the movie is based on a book by an anonymous author who uses the nom de plume Elena Ferrante. The actor Maggie Gyllenhaal acquired the rights to the story without ever meeting, or even knowing the identity of, Ferrante. When inking the deal, Gyllenhaal mentioned that she might want to direct it, even though she’d never directed before. Ferrante granted her the rights to the material on the condition that Gyllenhaal direct it. If she didn’t, Ferrante stipulated, the contract would be void. The creation of the work depended upon the faith that one woman placed into the hands and heart of another.

Later, Ferrante wrote an essay for The Guardian in which she talks about the process of letting go of her vision and embracing that of another woman: “I would never say to a woman director, ‘This is my book, this is my perspective. If you want to make a film, you have to stick to it.’ I wouldn’t say anything, even if she systematically betrayed my text, even if she wanted to use it simply as a launch pad for her own creative impulse…Part of me would like the story in Gyllenhaal’s images to adhere faithfully to my story, to never go outside the perimeter I drew. But my less primitive self knows that there’s something much more important at stake than this instinct to protect my own inventions. Another woman has found in that text good reason to test her creative capacities. Gyllenhaal has decided, that is, to give cinematic form not to my experience of the world but to hers.”

I won’t quote the entire thing here (though it really is worth reading in its entirety), but suffice it to say that she offers a manifesto of what it looks like to empower and collaborate with other women in a male-dominated field.

After the movie was released, Gyllenhaal described her role as a director like this, “I did definitely feel like—if you hire people who you're actually curious about and who you actually respect—a huge part of my job was to love them…and take care of them.” This was the first time I’d heard a filmmaker speak about care for others as an essential ingredient to the creative process. It inspired me to listen to more interviews with women directors.

In a 2019 director’s roundtable for The Hollywood Reporter, the moderator asked the (mostly male) panel how they protect actors on emotionally heavy films to make sure no one is getting worn down. The men cited things like “information” and “rehearsal.” Ava DuVernay, one of only two women directors at the table, said that she makes sure to have counselors on set: “If anyone wants to talk afterward, if you just want to go cry, if you just want to sit alone…because when you're asking people to go to these depths you have to take care of them,” she said. One of the male directors—whose previous film had been about human torture—asked her, incredulously, “Did anyone ever use [the counselors]?” “Yep,” she replied. He remarked that he’d never heard of anything like that before. DuVernay hadn’t either—it isn’t standard practice—she was simply responding to the experiences of her collaborators. “I would talk with actors afterward and they would tell me how hard a time they had...that this had done something, some real damage. And I said, how can we correct this? Just from a place of good health,” she said.

These are examples of feminine approaches to art making that any artist can embrace. And they provide us with a clearer understanding of how feminine and masculine elements can be consciously incorporated to create formidable bodies of work that are capable of supporting their makers as well as their audiences.

This is by no means an exhaustive survey of this topic—I could easily write 10,000 more words on it—it’s simply a means to start a conversation about the fullness of the creative experience and the opportunities we have available to us to engage one another. By separating the sex and gender of the maker from what they create, and how they create it, we allow every artist to bring the suppressed feminine into greater balance with the masculine forces that have been dominant for so long.

1. He is also, in my opinion, the great wool that the art world has pulled over its own eyes, but that’s a topic for another piece.

2. I didn’t include a photo from that series because I like you. If you’re curious, you can google “Jeff Koons Made in Heaven.” But consider yourself warned.