Beyond the Male Gaze

We are constantly being looked at. Walk down the street, scroll through Instagram, open an

art history textbook, and there it is: the ever present gaze. For centuries, women have been

painted, photographed, sculpted, and sketched as objects of desire, often through the eyes of

male artists. Their bodies arranged, perfected, and frozen into ideals. Walk into any

traditional gallery and you’ll likely be met with portraits of reclining nudes, women draped in

oil and brushstrokes, cast as seductresses, temptresses, or symbols of purity. Their bodies are

presented not as their own, but as material for the artist’s, predominantly male, imagination.

These aren’t women painted to be understood. They are women painted to be consumed.

We live in a world that has taught us to see women before we hear them. This is the male

gaze, and for centuries, it dominated art. 

Feminist art breaks this down. To make art as a woman or gender non conforming person is a

radical act of reclaiming space. Take Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party for example,

transforming a banquet table into a shrine for forgotten women, each place setting

symbolising a figure history failed to honour.

Zanele Muholi, a self-described visual activist, creates bold, unflinching self-portraits that

confront the violence faced by Black LGBTQ+ communities in South Africa. Tracey Emin’s

My Bed turned private grief into public protest, rejecting the idea that women’s emotional

lives are embarrassing or unworthy of serious attention.

These works don’t ask to be liked. They don’t aim to be pretty. They are unapologetically

raw, political, intimate and powerful. They ask viewers to feel discomfort, to question their

assumptions, to see the human being behind the image.

But the fight for liberation through art is far from over. Today, only 11% of art acquired by

major galleries is made by women. Women and non-binary artists are still underrepresented,

underfunded, and often dismissed as “too emotional,” “too angry,” or “too feminist.” That’s

why creating and advocating for feminist art remains urgent.

Art becomes not just an expression but a weapon against patriarchy, against censorship,

against forgetting. It gives language to the unspoken. It transforms pain into something

public, something unignorable. It says you are here, and you are not going anywhere.

So the next time you walk into a gallery, scroll through an artist’s feed, or stare at a sketch

taped to a streetlight, I implore you to be mindful of who is being centred and who is being

silenced.

Shift the gaze, centre the artist, not the object. 

Feminist art is not just a movement. It is a reminder that liberation starts when we dare to tell

our stories. Not prettied up or palatable, but messy, loud, honest, and entirely our own.