From coy to carnal, the female gaze is all encompassing

The female gaze is not an inversion of what we have come to define as the male gaze. We would be wise to embrace its full spectrum, from coy to carnal

I was 11 years old when I saw Milind Soman flexing inside a magician’s cauldron. Alisha Chinai’s 1995 music video for Made in India revolutionised the pop scene on Indian television, and not just because it was the first time we saw a singer appear as herself instead of having models lip-sync. That valuable piece of music history aside, we saw a young queen on a chaise lounge in her velvet-lined durbar, leopard purring by her side, auditioning men. Soman, draped in a crisp white dhoti—who the queen too had envisioned inside the magician’s cauldron—emerged from a wooden crate and swept her, and us, away.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been asking friends what comes to mind when they think of the female gaze in the Indian context. “Maybe Laurent from English Vinglish,” “Maybe Shah Rukh Khan in Dear Zindagi” (interestingly both films are directed by Gauri Shinde), and “Anuja Chauhan’s heroes in fiction,” said a friend whom I usually credit with having all the answers. But here she was limited. With others, we repeatedly returned to our pre-teen memory of Soman emerging like a virile but obedient zoo animal from a crate, but we had more success listing what were not good examples: the male gaze wrapped up in lace and lipstick to masquerade as female empowerment.

Take the lead women in the Amazon Prime Video series Four More Shots Please!, whose idea of modernism is deeply rooted in popular male tropes of heavy drinking and swearing. Their lovemaking is constricted by uncomfortable underwire. The sole lesbian relationship is set up within a distinct heteronormative construct. Just because a story is about women—and in this case written, directed and shot by women—it doesn’t mean it can’t fall prey to years of conditioning which dictate that the women on screen must be objectified for the viewer, even when a character is doing her own bit by objectifying a charming gynaecologist. (And what does it say about the scarcity of our male icons of desire that he is played by Soman?)

Even in a culture with cinema as its beating heart, few movie stars over the years have spoken to the female gaze. Rajesh Khanna did, which is why many of us have stories of an aunt who married his photograph. I have various accounts of how women in my mother’s Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi were hospitalised the day Khanna got married in 1973; fainting, attempted suicide, total chaos. Amitabh Bachchan, whose ‘Angry Young Man’ image was created for young Indian men to identify with him, could never have that effect on women. Shah Rukh Khan does, and economist Shrayana Bhattacharya perceptively uses him as a lens to map the economic and personal trajectories of Indian women in her compelling book, Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence (2021), which is about many things but primarily about the female gaze. And no, Ranveer Singh sprawled naked upon a carpet was evidently not directed for female pleasure. While it did have its takers among women, I’m not surprised that it found its most enthusiastic champions in the queer community. “Physicality is important, but the female gaze is often just about how the men make the women feel. The recent crop of Bollywood stars have done very little for that,” TV producer and writer Naomi Datta tells me, adding Fawad Khan in Zindagi Gulzar Hai and Shah Rukh Khan in “everything” as exceptions.

Who controls the fantasy?

When British film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term ‘male gaze’ in her now-classic 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, she relied on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theories to argue that the male gaze is made up of three looks: the look of the character, the look of camera and the look of the audience. Her chief concern was the imbalanced gender dynamics in the movies, with an active male objectifying a passive female. Today, TV show Bridgerton’s celebrated sex scenes, where the audience sees the Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page) through the eyes of Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor), the focus on him and his frequent removal of flouncy white shirts, turns Mulvey’s concerns on their head.

Champions of the female gaze would say it’s about more than that and I agree. Beyond steamy scenes, Bridgerton celebrates the female gaze by provoking its mostly female audience to identify with the central character Daphne’s coming-of-age experience. “When we speak of the female gaze, we speak of women no longer existing in relation to men but as whole beings,” says writer Shunali Khullar Shroff, listing Rohena Gera’s movie Sir, Namita Gokhale’s social satire Paro, Iravati Karve’s Yuganta and Satyajit Ray’s Charulata as standout examples. The female gaze, like feminism, goes beyond merely turning the gaze around and having women objectify men. It transcends the male-female binary to propose more holistic dynamics for everyone. Scholars, critics and practitioners across disciplines have been understandably taken up with the question: Who holds the power in the narrative? Who controls the fantasy?

Mulvey’s theory has strong parallels in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), a seminal book on Western art history. Berger devotes an entire chapter to gender roles in art. His “Men watch. Women watch themselves being watched” is an aphorism all women filmmakers, artists and writers must intuitively be aware of. I find pointed references to this omnipresent male gaze everywhere; most recently, in this line in Kamila Shamsie’s new novel, Best of Friends (2022): “It was a triumph, if you were a woman, to move between visibility and invisibility in a way that suited you…”

Conversations have come to the forefront in recent years in large part due to creators such as Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Céline Sciamma, and recent shows such as Girls and The Bold Type. Closer home, we have OTT shows such as Alankrita Shrivastava’s Bombay Begums and Sonam Nair’s Masaba Masaba, which don’t oppose so much as counteract the male gaze by emphasising consent, female pleasure and ambition over visual stimuli and hypersexualisation. The female gaze gives agency to the person being gazed upon. Sciamma, who directed Portrait of a Lady on Fire, has said in interviews that she sees her film as a manifesto about the female gaze. She poses the question of how the “looked at” look at themselves, woven lyrically into a storyline about a painter and a muse in a lesbian romance. Almost 50 years after Mulvey wrote her essay, questions of race, caste, sexual orientation and gender identity must also be part of the conversation.

Shaming the gaze

Paeans to the female gaze on the Internet focus on “lingering eye contact, brushes of the hand, a thundering heartbeat” and words like “anticipation, tension, and yearning.” When the idea is to represent women authentically, these have a place in the bigger picture. But it is problematic when this becomes the whole picture, almost making the idea of the female gaze pleasure-phobic. Have we learnt nothing from Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick (1997), a novel at once unapologetically randy, and unmistakably feminist?

In 2022, a TV show like Never Have I Ever is under scrutiny for its protagonist, 16-year-old Tamil-American character Devi Vishwakumar, being “too boy crazy”. Vishwakumar reminds me of one of the two protagonists in my debut novel The Illuminated, 25-year-old Tara Mallick, who is a covetous young woman. She has her eyes set on being the foremost Sanskrit scholar in the world, but also on a restaurateur’s athletic calves, on a monk’s muscular shoulders. Referring to a long paragraph (see below) where she describes what she admires in male bodies, one reviewer pointed out that “the same critiques against fetishization and commodification could apply to this brand of feminism too.” Yet Mallick describes the man she is inexorably attracted to by the luminosity of his skin, his posture, and handwriting. She goes from carnal to coy, a privilege we should afford to both fictional characters and ourselves.

The female gaze deserves to be unshackled from narrow definitions. It has an equal right to be domineering and controlling. While it is not just about turning the tables around and having women objectify men, sometimes it should be allowed to be just that. Hear it from Tara Mallick:

Tara loved male bodies. She had a recurring dream in which all the boys she had fucked were naked, lined up against a wall. Their faces were obscured but she knew them by their bodies. She liked their jaws, the chins with a two-day stubble. She liked the way shirt cuffs sat when rolled on a solid forearm. A wrist that could hold an oversized watch. The bone in the middle of the chest. The deep river of their spines. The hard triangle where the river formed a delta. She liked to hold their ass. Feel muscle flex under the flat of her palm. She liked calves that bulged from exercise. The smells in the corners of their bodies. Not those bright new smells. Old- school musk and amber. She liked the things boys did. The way they strained their faces while they shaved. The way they wrapped a towel low on their waist after a shower. The way they pretended not to notice when she stared. The way she could make them hard with a fingernail grazing skin. The way she could make their eyes soft. The exultation with which they dipped roti in mutton curry, undid bra hooks and zippered dresses. Fingers, except rings on fingers. She loved fingers with neatly trimmed nails. (Excerpt from The Illuminated)

The writer is an arts journalist and editor based in Mumbai. Her debut novel The Illuminated is out in India and forthcoming in the UK by Head of Zeus in January 2023.

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