What is The Female Gayze?

In 1975, radical film theorist Laura Mulvey published her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Screen, coining the now iconic term “the male gaze” and giving language to a phenomenon many already knew in their bones:

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.”

The mission of The Female Gayze is to conceive of a new language of desire. My quest is to uncover my own inner gayze, uncover her desires and see the world through her lens. So I am peeling back the lenses and the filters I’ve been fed. My music will, as Mulvey says, “create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire.” My desire.

I hope you’ll join me on my heroine’s journey, and that my attempt at cultural untangling might inspire and support your own.

ps. If you didn’t catch it yet, I’m also very gay.