On March 15, 2026 at the 98th Academy Awards, Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman ever to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography. It got me thinking about what we talk about when we talk about the “female gaze” and how we should be talking more about the women who are literally behind the camera when we do so.
If you’re as terminally online as me, you’ve definitely seen someone say that soft or misunderstood male characters like Jacob Elordi in Frankenstein are examples of “the real female gaze.” This is often posed as in opposition to some dehydrated muscle-y hunk on the cover of Men’s Health, right? Maybe you’ve also been privy to multiple rounds of discourse about how certain women “dress for the male gaze.” Not To be a buzzkill, but neither of those are really what “the gaze” is meant to refer to as a concept. For my sake, can we back up?
