Bernadette Soriano

In the current cultural milieu, few concepts spark more impassioned discourse, and fatigue, than the gaze. The male gaze. The female gaze. The queer gaze. The non-gaze. Somewhere along the way, to create with a gaze in mind became a kind of artistic taboo, a mark of ideological impurity. And to appeal to the male gaze in particular? A cardinal sin.


There is a certain suspicion now embedded in aesthetic pleasure, particularly if it is coded feminine, overtly sexual, or romantically indulgent. As though any act of adornment — wearing a red dress, filming a close-up of glossy lips, painting a soft silhouette — must first pass a moral tribunal. Who are you dressing for? Who are you performing for? Whose gaze does this serve?

And yet I find myself wondering, increasingly exasperated: Why must the presence of a gaze be treated as a contamination? Why is catering to the gaze — any gaze — automatically equated with submission, with the erosion of agency?

Here’s what’s often forgotten in this conversation: art, at its core, is a form of address. A painting does not exist in isolation; it beckons the viewer. A film gazes back at its audience. A poem, even when whispered into the folds of a diary, presupposes the presence of a reader. To create is to communicate. And to communicate is, inherently, to consider one’s recipient.

This tension is not new. In Visual Anthropology, John Collier posits that “seeing” is not just biological—it’s cultural. We learn how to look, and how to interpret what we see, through our social conditioning. The gaze is not merely a reflection of desire but a structure shaped by centuries of hierarchy, religion, gender politics, and colonial history.

In the Philippine context, that structure is doubly burdened. The legacy of colonial Catholic shame collides with hyper-visual Western capitalism. Desire is permitted, but only in hushed tones. Beauty is commercialized, but only if it’s mestiza. Take the films of Joey Gosiengfiao in the ‘70s —Temptation Island or Bomba Star, mocked by highbrow critics for their camp and sexual innuendo, yet undeniably reveling in a gaze both male and self-aware. Were they pandering? Or playing the system in high heels?

To appeal to a specific gaze, then, is not necessarily to capitulate to it. It can be — radically, deliberately — an act of engagement. Whether a woman films herself in soft lighting or pens a lyric soaked in desire, she is not automatically submitting to the audience’s desire. 

She may, in fact, be negotiating it, recontextualizing it, even weaponizing it.

We must account, too, for psychological agency.

In Self-Determination Theory, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan assert that autonomy is not simply about independence, but about volition. A person is autonomous not when they reject influence entirely, but when they act with a sense of ownership. A Filipina artist painting her nude form for a thesis show may be aware of the viewer’s gaze — but that does not void her authorship. To accuse her of internalized objectification simply because she anticipates an audience is to deny her intellectual sovereignty.

But such nuance is often flattened in popular discourse. We are conditioned to see agency only in defiance, not in strategic participation. A woman in a slinky dress is assumed to be either liberated or oppressed, never self-aware enough to hold both realities in tension. Her autonomy is measured by how thoroughly she resists being looked at, not how confidently she choreographs the looking.

The same reductive binaries haunt male performance, especially among queer or non-masculine-presenting men. When men like Bretman Rock or Paolo Ballesteros don makeup, they are not simply reversing the gaze — they’re queering it, exaggerating it, and reclaiming visual self-styling as an art form rather than deviance. Their self-presentation invites a gaze that is not easily legible: is this parody, empowerment, or both?

Resistance to fluid or feminine performance is not merely a matter of personal bias; it is embedded in the critical standards through which we evaluate artistic legitimacy.

Take Marie Antoinette (2006), Sofia Coppola’s much-maligned pastel epic. Its sugar-drenched aesthetic: silk ribbons, powdered wigs, champagne breakfasts — was quickly dismissed by critics as indulgent, unserious, frivolous. But that dismissal reveals more about our discomfort with femininity as spectacle than any true aesthetic failing. When Stanley Kubrick frames a hallway with mathematical precision, it’s called masterful. When Coppola lingers in a shoe closet, it’s vanity.

In the same vein when Wes Anderson meticulously styles male melancholia in The Royal Tenenbaums or Asteroid City, the aestheticization of male sadness is framed as auteurist brilliance, not narcissism. The male gaze, when turned inward, becomes palatable — intellectualized. Yet when women do the same with their bodies or moods, it’s often dismissed as indulgence.

The same discomfort appears in how Darna is interpreted: either as feminist icon or male fantasy. But perhaps she is both. In the 2005 GMA adaptation, Darna is framed through low angles, her costume impossibly tight. Yet Narda’s transformation is also undeniably about empowerment—her physical beauty not a weakness, but a signal of strength.

Why can’t the visual pleasure of power coexist with its symbolism?

The male gaze, long theorized and still prevalent, positions the viewer as active and the subject as passive—defined less by identity than by accessibility. It operates through fragmentation, framing women as surfaces to be consumed. 

In Peque Gallaga’s Scorpio Nights (1985), the woman appears primarily as projection — seen through a peephole, shaped by absence rather than agency. Here, the gaze functions structurally: organizing narrative around visibility, control, and desire.

The female gaze emerges in contrast — characterized by emotional proximity, interiority, and reflexivity. It emphasizes presence over spectacle, subjectivity over display. 

In Antoinette Jadaone’s Fan Girl (2020), the camera aligns with the young protagonist’s perspective, reversing the usual power dynamic. Charlie Dizon is not eroticized, and Paulo Avelino becomes the focal point of a gaze that dissects rather than admires. The viewer is drawn into discomfort, not allure; what is revealed is not fantasy, but rupture.

The queer gaze resists linear framing, attuned instead to ambiguity, restraint, and emotional texture.
 
In Samantha Lee’s Billie and Emma (2018), desire unfolds in silence and proximity rather than overt gesture. The camera observes without possessing, privileging quiet tension over resolution. Bodies are not aestheticized but situated — intimacy becomes its own visual logic.

We see a different kind of subversion in the films of Wong Kar-wai, where men — often emotionally repressed — become subjects of lush, longing cinematography. 

In Happy Together (1997), Tony Leung’s character is framed with the same tender, almost erotic melancholy often reserved for women in heteronormative cinema. His vulnerability becomes the spectacle, flipping the usual script of control. This gaze isn’t just about sexual orientation — it’s about aestheticizing emotional interiority in men, something the traditional male gaze has long resisted.

The non-gaze, or ungaze, rejects the premise of spectacle altogether. It displaces viewership as the central mode of engagement. 

In Brenda Fajardo’s Baraha ng Pilipino, figures are rendered not for display but for historical placement. Women are presented not as icons, but as agents within cultural memory. The visual language avoids embellishment; the act of looking is reframed as recognition over consumption.

Perhaps the more dangerous dichotomy is not between male and female gazes, but between moralized gazes and immoral ones. The female gaze, as it is now popularly defined, is often imbued with a kind of ethical superiority: it is soft, complex, unthreatening, anti-objectifying. By contrast, the male gaze is flattened into a cartoon villain — ever-predatory, always reductive.

This, I think, is a trap. Not because the critique of the male gaze is unimportant, it is. It has exposed, with righteous clarity, how entire industries have profited from women as objects, not subjects. But when critique calcifies into doctrine, it stops illuminating and starts policing. We begin to suspect every red lip of ideological failure, every sultry performance of betrayal.

Worse: we forget that artistry itself is not a performance of political cleanliness. 

Not every painting is a protest. Not every photograph is a thesis. Sometimes, art exists for the sheer sensuality of it, because the light hits right, because the body curves beautifully, because the moment seduces the artist into saying yes.

Even Amorsolo — long viewed as a nationalist painter — rendered women in soft-focus glow, always backlit, always demure. Today, his idealized Filipinas are contested: were they empowering depictions of rural womanhood, or sanitized spectacles for colonial nostalgia? Both arguments hold weight—but neither erases the fact that his women, however lit, remain central to the gaze of nationhood.

Think, too, of contemporary male performers like Jungkook or Troye Sivan, whose sensual self-presentation invites both desire and disruption. Their visibility is carefully staged — but that staging doesn't dilute their agency. Rather, it magnifies how male bodies, too, are increasingly subject to the gaze. What changes is how we read them: when a man is sexualized, the assumption isn’t loss of agency but control over it.

But perhaps that’s the point: we read meaning into visibility, but only selectively. A woman in red is a warning; a man in lace, a wink. The gaze doesn’t just reveal power — it reveals our assumptions about who’s allowed to be looked at, and on what terms. Not every pose is a thesis. Not every performance demands interpretation.

This is not a call to depoliticize art entirely. To pretend that the gaze has no power dynamics is naïve. But to insist that every instance of its use must carry ideological gravitas is exhausting, and dishonest. We lose the richness of human expression when we demand that it constantly justify itself within binary frames: feminist or not, empowering or oppressive, ally or enemy.

What if a sultry song exists not to pander, but to thrill? What if a photograph of a reclining woman is not a submission, but an offering? What if a lipstick is worn not for men, not for feminism, but simply because red feels good on a Tuesday?

The gaze, like language, is a tool. It can be used to dominate. But it can also be used to seduce, to subvert, to self-style. The act of looking — and being looked at — is not inherently violent. What is violent is the monopoly: when one way of seeing becomes the only way to be seen.

In literature, we see this in the contrast between Dekada '70 and The Mango Bride. One is overtly political, resistant. The other, emotionally intimate, textured with unspoken tensions. And yet both are deeply female, deeply seen. Must only the former be considered powerful?

Art is not purity. Art is conversation. Art is saying, “Here. This is how I see myself. Will you look?” And the gaze, in its many forms, is simply one way of responding.

Not a hero. Not a villain. Just a mirror held up, asking us not to choose sides — but to see more clearly.