Writing the Female Gaze: Narrative Strategies for Reclaiming Perspective

In literary and cinematic traditions, the representation of women has often been shaped through what feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey famously called the “male gaze.” This concept refers to the objectification of women as passive figures for visual pleasure, serving the desires of a presumed heterosexual male spectator. In prose fiction, the dynamics of this gaze manifest not only in descriptive passages but also in narrative structure, focalization, and the distribution of agency. By contrast, the “female gaze” is not a simple inversion. It is a reorientation of perspective that centers women as subjects of experience, interpreters of meaning, and agents of desire. In this post, I explore the narrative strategies in fiction through techniques that foreground the female gaze.

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Theoretical Foundations of the Female Gaze

The idea of the female gaze emerged as a response to Laura Mulvey’s influential essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), which articulated the concept of the “male gaze.” Mulvey argued that mainstream film positioned women as objects of visual pleasure for an assumed heterosexual male viewer, while men functioned as active agents who controlled the look and propelled the story. In literature, similar dynamics manifest when female characters are reduced to surfaces for description rather than being endowed with interiority or narrative authority.

The female gaze does not simply invert this structure by turning men into objects of women’s desire. Instead, it destabilizes the hierarchy of looking altogether. It emphasizes women’s subjectivity and their capacity to interpret, to desire, to act, and to narrate, as central to meaning-making in the text. Where the male gaze often fragments or fetishizes women’s bodies, the female gaze foregrounds lived experience, emotional resonance, and the complexities of embodiment.

Example of the male gaze in fiction can be found in works where female characters are explicitly written as ornamental, passive, or existing primarily as projections of male fantasy. For instance:

• In Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Maria functions largely as a love object whose purpose is to comfort and inspire the male hero, Robert Jordan. Her trauma and desires are minimized in order to foreground his moral journey.

• In D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, female bodies are repeatedly described through fetishistic detail, while male characters are endowed with philosophical depth and agency.

These texts illustrate how the male gaze reduces women to symbols or fragments within men’s stories. In contrast, the female gaze in literature foregrounds women’s interiority and interpretive power:

• In Toni Morrison’s Sula, the narrative centers on Black women’s friendships, choices, and interior struggles, giving them authority as interpreters of their world.

• In Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., the protagonist’s consciousness dominates the narrative, turning bodily experience and metaphysical reflection into the central drama.

The comparison shows that the difference in destabilizing the hierarchy altogether: the female gaze builds narrative meaning from within women’s subjectivity, rather than treating them as passive objects of vision. bell hooks expanded this conversation with her concept of the “oppositional gaze” (Black Looks: Race and Representation, 1992), which highlights how women of color resist both racialized and gendered forms of objectification.

While bell hooks’s concept of the oppositional gaze has been central to feminist theory, other marginalized traditions also expand this conversation. Indigenous writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich challenge not only patriarchal but also colonial gazes by foregrounding Native women’s perspectives as interpreters of history and community. Asian and Asian diasporic authors, including Maxine Hong Kingston in The Woman Warrior, use fragmented storytelling and mythic overlays to reclaim women’s voices against cultural silencing. Similarly, Chicana and Latina theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera fuse autobiography, poetry, and theory to situate female agency at the border of multiple identities. These diverse contributions highlight that the female gaze must be understood as plural, evolving through many cultural and historical contexts rather than confined to a single lineage.

This critique underscores that vision and representation are not neutral acts but are embedded in systems of power that include race, class, and sexuality alongside gender. Thus, the female gaze must be understood intersectionally: it is not only about reclaiming agency for women in general but also about recognizing the diverse ways women perceive and narrate the world. In practice, the theoretical foundation of the female gaze insists on repositioning women as agents of perception and narrative authority. It asks writers to consider: who is allowed to look, who is being looked at, and how power circulates in that act of looking.

Narrative Voice and Focalization

One of the most direct strategies for reclaiming perspective is through narrative voice. First-person narration allows female protagonists to control their own representation by filtering events through their consciousness. For instance, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the protagonist’s descent into madness is inseparable from her own narration. Rather than being observed, she observes herself and the oppressive domestic space around her.

Third-person narration can also enact the female gaze when it aligns focalization closely with women’s experiences. The narrator may describe male characters from the standpoint of female perception, reversing habitual hierarchies of desirability and authority. Such techniques destabilize the assumed neutrality of the male lens.

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In contemporary fiction, the female gaze can be deepened by experimenting with multiplicity of voices. In my own book Us, Women, the unnamed narrator recounts the lives of four women friends whose identities unfold through dialogue, confession, and misremembered advice. The choice of narration resists the single, authoritative storyteller that often dominates traditional prose. Instead, the narrative emerges as a chorus of voices, sometimes contradictory, often flawed, but always rooted in women’s interpretive power. Through these voices that overlap and compete, the story foregrounds interiority and solidarity without collapsing into simplification. This polyphonic structure enacts the female gaze by making women’s subjectivity not just the content of the story but also the very form through which meaning is created.

Embodied Subjectivity and Desire

A key element of the female gaze is the portrayal of women as desiring subjects rather than desired objects. This requires reconfiguring how bodies are written. Instead of emphasizing surfaces for external appraisal, the narrative may explore embodiment from within: sensations, emotions, vulnerabilities, and pleasures as lived by the character. Writers like Anaïs Nin experimented with this technique by portraying female erotic subjectivity in her diaries and fiction, challenging the notion that female sexuality exists only as an object of male fantasy.

Importantly, the female gaze need not exclude representations of attraction or intimacy. Rather, it situates desire within the agency of the woman who looks, feels, and chooses.

Spatial and Social Positioning

Narratives frequently stage women in relation to domestic, social, or institutional spaces. The female gaze reclaims these settings by granting women the power to interpret and shape them. Toni Morrison, for example, constructs spaces in Beloved where memory, trauma, and resilience are mediated through women’s perspectives. Morrison’s women do not merely inhabit their environments; they define and transform them through their interpretations and actions.

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In my own novel Red Wings, I pursued this reconfiguration by centering Lili’s interiority. Though she enters a world of fetishistic prostitution, her experiences are not presented as spectacle for an outside observer. Instead, her body is written from within her desire, shame, and compulsions rendered as shifting sensations and internal monologues. The female gaze here lies in giving Lili narrative agency: she does not exist to ornament another character’s story, but to narrate her own fractured longing and confrontation with power. Importantly, the female gaze need not exclude representations of attraction or intimacy. Rather, it situates desire within the agency of the woman who looks, feels, and chooses. In texts shaped by this perspective, women are not reduced to what they are seen to be; they become the ones who see, who desire, and who redefine the meaning of embodiment itself.

Dialogic and Polyphonic Strategies

Reclaiming perspective also occurs through dialogue and multiplicity of voices. Women’s narratives that include polyphonic structures allow for overlapping, sometimes conflicting perspectives that resist singular definition. This disrupts the fixed identity often imposed on women by external gazes. Works like Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels demonstrate how female friendship becomes a site for shared narration, revealing interior lives that refuse simplification. Such dialogic strategies reflect the lived complexity of women’s experiences, challenging narratives that cast women as silent or marginal.

Subverting Tropes and Genres

Another strategy involves reworking traditional genres that historically objectified women. In noir fiction, for example, the femme fatale has often been a figure of male fear and fascination. Contemporary writers can subvert this trope by giving voice to the so-called fatal woman, reframing her motivations and contradictions. Similarly, romance narratives can be reimagined to explore women’s agency in shaping desire, rather than presenting them as prizes to be won. Subversion requires not only critique but also reconstruction: building new forms of narrative pleasure that validate women’s subjectivity.

Intersectional Considerations

The female gaze must also account for differences across race, class, sexuality, and cultural contexts. To write all women under a single perspective risks reinscribing erasure. For instance, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Americanah illustrates how the gaze intersects with migration, race, and belonging. The protagonist’s perspective is shaped by both gendered and racialized dynamics, reminding readers that the female gaze is not monolithic but relational and situated.

Practical Techniques for Writers

To integrate the female gaze into narrative craft, several concrete strategies can be employed:

1. Prioritize interiority: Emphasize thoughts, feelings, and reflections over external description.

2. Shift power in description: Present male characters through female perception, reversing conventional hierarchies of the gaze.

3. Reframe embodiment: Explore sensory and emotional experiences from within, rather than presenting bodies as visual objects.

4. Employ multiple voices: Allow conflicting perspectives to coexist, reflecting the heterogeneity of women’s experiences.

5. Restructure desire: Position women as active subjects of longing and decision-making.

6. Reclaim spaces: Treat settings as extensions of women’s agency, rather than backdrops for containment.

7. Interrogate tropes: Identify traditional gendered archetypes and rewrite them with complexity and agency.

So, writing the female gaze involves more than replacing who looks and who is looked at. It is a broader project of narrative justice that reclaims perspective, authority, and subjectivity. In doing so, writers contribute not only to literary innovation but also to a cultural shift in how stories recognize and represent women’s lives.