Female gaze

The female gaze is a feminist theory term referring to the gaze of the female spectator, character or director of an artistic work, but more than the gender it is an issue of representing women as subjects having agency. As such all genders can create films with a female gaze. It is a response to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey's term "the male gaze", which represents not only the gaze of a heterosexual male viewer but also the gaze of the male character and the male creator of the film. In that sense it is close, though different, from the Matrixial gaze coined in 1985 by Bracha L. Ettinger.^[1]^[2] In contemporary usage, the female gaze has been used to refer to the perspective a female filmmaker (screenwriter/director/producer) brings to a film that might be different from a male view of the subject.

^ Ettinger, Bracha L., The Matrixial Gaze. University of Leeds Publishing, 1995.
^ Ettinger, Bracha L., The Matrixial Borderspace. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-8166-3587-0

[1] Ettinger, Bracha L., The Matrixial Gaze. University of Leeds Publishing, 1995.

[2] Ettinger, Bracha L., The Matrixial Borderspace. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-8166-3587-0

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