From steamy romantasy novels to premium television dramas, culture is increasingly centring the agency, desires and interior lives of women. This shift, long in the making, is now proving commercially successful, but questions remain over whether it represents a permanent change or a passing trend.
The female gaze—storytelling that highlights the complex inner worlds and wants of women—has moved from guilty pleasure to mainstream phenomenon. Examples abound: the passionate worlds of Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros, the emotional arcs of TV series such as Bridgerton and Big Little Lies, and the challenging cinema of Emerald Fennell. This body of work subverts the male gaze, a concept coined in 1973 by film theorist Laura Mulvey to describe how women have long been reduced to objects of desire in art and media.
While arthouse films like Jane Campion's The Piano and Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire have explored female subjectivity for decades, the female gaze is now breaking through in the mainstream. Emerald Fennell's adaptation of Wuthering Heights filters Emily Brontë's story through a female-centric psychological lens, while the romantasy genre generated $610m in annual sales in 2024, buoyed by millions of views on TikTok's BookTok community.
One standout example of the female gaze on screen is last year's Emmy-nominated Dying for Sex, starring Michelle Williams as a woman with terminal cancer who embarks on a sexual awakening. Director Shannon Murphy, known for Killing Eve and The Power, notes that such stories offer a more meandering, holistic view of female experience. 'I think if we start telling more stories like that it will, culturally, help us to not see things in such a black-and-white way,' she says.
Iris Brey, author of The Female Gaze: A Revolution on Screen, calls Dying for Sex 'super important' for tackling taboos around women's pleasure and illness. As the female gaze continues to gain traction, it challenges long-held conventions and offers new ways of seeing women's lives on screen and in fiction.
