This feminist suit makes eye contact with the men gazing at it

March 10, 2022

Photo: courtesy Behnaz Farahi

This exploitative male perspective has largely designed the world in which we live.

The gist:

This is “Returning the Gaze,” the latest project by the Iranian-American artist Behnaz Farahi. Created at the invitation of the fashion label ANNAKIKI for its cyborg-themed Milan show last month,” the “entire suit is built for a model to stare back, powerfully, at her gawkers.”

Her work “is largely inspired by film theorist Laura Mulvey’s landmark essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, which outlines the impact of the male gaze.”

“The male gaze is not merely an uncomfortable but fleeting sensation of being checked out against your will; it’s an inescapable, omnipresent point of view that’s shaped our culture.”

—Laura Mulvey

The artist, is also attracted to another concept: surveillance feminism, “or the idea of cameras and other tools that are often used to excerpt the male gaze [that] could be augmented for female empowerment. “

“Surveillance usually has a bad connotation,” she says, “but how you use surveillance as a feminist act? I’m super interested in it.”

Photos: courtesy Behnaz Farahi
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