Allow me to bore you with a paraphrased Wikipedia definition: gaze is simply how one perceives people, either others or themself. Looking looks like an innocent act. But to quote Ms Wikipedia summarizing Jean-Paul Sartre: “the act of gazing at another human being creates a subjective power difference, which is felt by the gazer and by the gazed because the person being gazed at is perceived as an object, not as a human being.”
The male gaze in particular often comes under scrutiny in my beloved video essays. When it comes to movies, many of us are familiar with common tropes.There’s the raunchy comedies that separate women into the beautiful and objectified, or dowdy and deplorable, with any shred of personality parceled into punchlines. There’s the indie films where blue-haired women with manic tendencies exist solely to lift a boring sad male protagonist from his misery. There’s the arthouse whatever where women are converted into vague metaphors. Action movies with bland heroines sent into battle with guns and no clothes. You get the gist.
I myself am a big fan of seeing pretty people on-screen. I don’t take issue with revealing clothes or suggestive dialogue. What worries me is objectification, and the passive worldview that comes from being the perceived, rather than the perceiver.
We’re all constantly perceiving each other through our own flawed lenses. It’s just that historically, some gazes get more screentime, more book pages. We are taught to experience the world through a limited number of eyes (there were but a few non-white-male authors in the canon of my childhood literary education). The “I” of the first-person narrative is limited in who gets to occupy it.
The “I” is active. The “I” gets to tell you about others. You have to take the “I” at face value, in books particularly, because the only vision of the world you get as a reader comes from the eyes of that “I.”
I myself moonlight as a writer when I’m not a bookseller, and I love the “I.” To write a story from the first-person point of view cements the narrator as an active agent. The world becomes filtered through one’s consciousness. People exist only in as far as the narrator perceives them.
I had for years been hesitant to write in the first person point of view. It seemed too revealing, sentimental, juvenile, like publishing diary pages. That was in the same era of life when I read many novels by male writers. Many of them were smart guys, exceptionally so. I nodded along to their observations on culture, politics, history, all peppered with punchy metaphors and cutting analyses. And then their gaze landed on someone other than a man, and our silver-tongued orators’ descriptive abilities slid down to third-grade levels of basic. If I tried to imagine my place as a young woman in their otherwise-astute worldview, I’d be relegating myself to a two-dimensional character. And I exist at the intersection of many privileged identities -- whiteness, able-bodiedness, being cisgender -- so I already get far more space as a subject (rather than object) than many others have historically had in literature.
Later, I developed a taste for memoirs, particularly those written not by men. Memoirs as a literary form provide a handy excuse to occupy the first person singular: “My life as I see it.” “The world through my eyes.” Memoirs can take many forms, perhaps most famously as the dishy maybe-ghostwritten tell-alls of celebrities. I indulge in these too, but am particularly fascinated by memoirs written as complex, deeply personal pieces of art. They inspire me to think of myself as an active participant in life, not someone else’s observation, to be an artist rather than a misperceived muse.
Below are two memoirs of note for Women’s History Month, recent reads I’ve adored. Tragic and funny, poignant and perplexing, detailed and poetic, these are by no means definitive, just ones I happen to really like.
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| Brutalities: A Love Story by Margo Steines Our
narrator is quarantined in a desert landscape, facing COVID and a
high-risk pregnancy. Her memoir bounces between an arid, sun-dried,
nervous, uncertain present, and a visceral, violent past. Since
adolescence, she’s worked in brutal jobs: as a teenage dominatrix, a
sheep-butchering farmer, a high-altitude welder, a writer chronicling
wrestlers. She’d gone through abusive relationships, disordered eating,
intense bouts of self-harm, extreme exercise obsession, and chronic
illness. Now, living together and in love with the father of her baby, a MMA
fighter who perfectly balances gentleness and power, Margo reflects on
her past, and what it means for bringing new life into a perilous world.
Her prose is packed with imagery you won’t forget. This is a memoir you
might need to take a few breathers in the midst of, but the piercing
beauty of it is so worth it. |
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| In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado As
a Machado fanatic, I’m biased; I’ll slurp up anything she serves with a
spoon. I know I’m not alone in adoring this memoir though. Part of the
appeal is its innovative structure: each chapter is a short snippet that
represents a section of the nightmarish Dream House. Then there’s the
fairy-tale imagery Machado weaves in with meticulous footnotes, and
fables that bleed into her reality. Also key to its success is her
chronicling an oft-silenced topic: abuse within queer relationships.
Machado interpolates sequences of childhood, of a power-imbalanced
connection with her youth pastor, a writing program in the midwest,
friendships and meals and parties, but the overarching narrative
concerns an ex-girlfriend who turned sour, switching from sweetheart to
abuser. Along the way, Machado laments how her experience felt like a
hidden narrative, as mysticized as her beloved fairy tales. To quote
Roxanne Gay: “What makes this book truly exceptional is how Machado
creates an archive where, shamefully, there is none. |
