On visual representation, self-objectification, and the radical possibility of sovereign perception
The act of seeing is never innocent. Every gaze carries a history of power, of representation, of who has been permitted to look and from where, and who has been positioned as the object of that looking. Feminist film theory, visual culture studies, and phenomenology have spent fifty years elaborating the politics of vision as they apply to women: how looking is organised to reproduce power relations; how women are trained to see themselves through the eyes of an imagined, evaluating other; and how challenging those habits of perception is more than an aesthetic project. It is a political one.
A note on language, because it matters here. Throughout, ‘women’ includes cis and trans women, and the argument also recognises that feminised objectification and bodily surveillance shape the lives of many non-binary people and some trans men, particularly where bodies are read through cisnormative expectations. The gaze does not simply sort the world into ‘men who look’ and ‘women who are looked at’.
It also polices who is seen as a woman, who is permitted to be feminine, whose femininity is recognised as authentic, and whose body is treated as a problem to be examined, corrected, mocked, or harmed. In other words, the politics of seeing are not only gendered but also cisnormative, and any adequate feminist account of visual culture must contend with that.
The concept of the ‘male gaze’, introduced by filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey in her foundational 1975 essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, has travelled far beyond the film-theory context in which it was coined, becoming one of the most widely applied concepts in feminist cultural criticism. That travel has, inevitably, produced some distortion: the concept has been simplified, misread, and sometimes deployed in ways that Mulvey herself has contested.
But its core insight remains clarifying and essential: that the dominant visual conventions of Western culture – in cinema, photography, painting, and advertising – organise women’s and feminised bodies as spectacle for a presumed male viewer, and that this organisation has psychological and political consequences that extend well beyond the cinema screen.
What is often underappreciated in popular receptions of the male gaze is the degree to which Mulvey was making an argument about structure, not individual intention. The male gaze is not a description of what any particular man does when he looks at a woman; it is a description of how the dominant visual apparatus of Western culture has been organised – the conventions of framing, lighting, editing, and narrative that constitute what we might call the grammar of the image.
To say that cinema constructs a male gaze is not to accuse every filmmaker of sexism; it is to say that the inherited conventions of the form encode a particular way of seeing, and that this encoding has consequences whether or not the individuals working within it are conscious of them. This structural argument is more challenging and more interesting than the personalistic version: it suggests that challenging the gaze requires not only changing who makes images, but rethinking the conventions through which images are made.
At the same time, a transfeminist approach asks us to name something adjacent to, and intertwined with, the male gaze: the cis gaze. This is the set of visual and social conventions through which cisness is treated as the default, and through which trans and gender-nonconforming people are scrutinised for ‘proof’ of legitimacy. It is the gaze that demands gender be readable at a glance; that treats ambiguity as suspicious; that frames trans embodiment as either spectacle or deception; that turns ‘passing’ into both a survival strategy and a moving target. If the male gaze is one of the organising logics of visual culture, the cis gaze is one of its enforcement mechanisms – and the two often operate together.
Mulvey, cinema, and the structure of visual pleasure
Mulvey’s argument drew on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist cultural theory to analyse the pleasure structures embedded in Hollywood cinema. She argued that mainstream cinema offers two primary modes of visual pleasure: voyeuristic scopophilia (the pleasure of looking at another as object) and narcissistic identification (the pleasure of identifying with an idealised on-screen figure). Both of these pleasures, she argued, were structured in Hollywood film around a masculine subject position: the camera assumed a male eye, the narrative identified with a male protagonist, and women were positioned as objects of the look rather than as subjects who look.
The political consequences of this visual structure, Mulvey argued, were not confined to the cinema. Cinematic pleasure trains its viewers in ways of seeing – in the eroticisation of women’s and feminised bodies as spectacle; in the naturalisation of male subjectivity as the default; in the assumption that the body coded as feminine exists primarily as a visual object rather than a site of agency. These trained habits of perception are then exported into everyday life, shaping how women see themselves and how others see them.
It is worth pausing on the mechanism of this export, because it is not self-explanatory. How does a set of conventions operating in a darkened room translate into the habitual self-perception of women going about their daily lives? The answer, in part, is sheer repetition and saturation. The average person in a contemporary Western city is exposed to thousands of images daily – on screens, on billboards, in magazines, on packaging, in the social media feeds that now constitute a significant portion of waking attention.
These images do not simply reflect a pre-existing visual culture; they constitute it. The grammar of the image that Mulvey identified in Hollywood cinema of the 1970s has migrated across every visual medium, intensified by the concentration of media ownership and the algorithmic amplification that rewards engagement, which, in image-based culture, reliably means the idealised, the sexualised, and the aspiration-generating. The phone screen has replaced the cinema screen, and the phone screen is with us always.
And this matters transfeministically because the phone screen not only delivers a sexualised beauty ideal; it delivers a regime of gender legibility. It teaches audiences what a ‘real’ woman or ‘real’ man is supposed to look like, and it punishes those who fall outside those narrow cues through mockery, misgendering, harassment, exclusion, and sometimes violence. The visual field is doing two jobs at once: disciplining femininity into a commodity and disciplining gender into a binary.
“When the body becomes primarily an object to be viewed rather than a subject to be inhabited, something is lost – not incidentally but necessarily.”
Subsequent feminist film scholars complicated and extended Mulvey’s argument. Mary Ann Doane wrote about the ‘masquerade’ as a strategy by which women might negotiate the male gaze; bell hooks developed the concept of the ‘oppositional gaze’, the specifically Black feminist gaze that looks back at cinema and cultural representation with critical resistance; Teresa de Lauretis examined the ideological work of narrative in constructing gender; Kaja Silverman analysed the soundtrack as well as the image. These elaborations enriched the framework without abandoning its fundamental insight: that vision is organised by power, and that the dominant organisation of vision in Western culture positions women as objects rather than subjects of the gaze.
Transfeminist scholarship and organising add crucial extensions of their own. The ‘look’ does not only eroticise; it also verifies, interrogates, and polices. Trans women, especially, are often positioned under a form of hostile spectatorship that is not reducible to either misogyny or transphobia alone: transmisogyny, the specific devaluation and punishment of trans femininity.
The cultural fixation on ‘clocking’ – the insistence that trans women’s bodies are puzzles to be solved, impostors to be exposed – is a visual politics. It recruits strangers into a kind of unappointed border force, trained by media clichés and internet cruelty to read bodies for ‘tells’, and it makes public space itself a site of potential inspection. In this regime, being looked at is not merely being desired or appraised; it can be being assessed for legitimacy, safety, and belonging.
It is also worth noting what the male gaze framework does not claim, since misreadings have been used to dismiss it. It does not claim that all looking is inherently oppressive, that men cannot appreciate women aesthetically without objectifying them, or that women cannot derive genuine pleasure from visual culture.
It claims something more limited and more precise: that a specific set of conventions, historically developed and institutionally reproduced, has organised the visual field in ways that systematically position women’s and feminised bodies as spectacle rather than subject – and that these conventions have consequences for how people experience their own bodies and their place in the world. The framework is a tool of analysis, not a moral condemnation of looking as such. Its value is precisely its specificity: it allows us to ask, of any given image or visual practice, what are the conventions at work here, who is presumed to be looking, from what position, and to what end?
The concept has been applied well beyond cinema: to advertising, to fashion photography, to social media, to the museum, to architecture, to the organisation of public space. In each of these domains, the basic structure recurs: bodies coded as feminine are displayed, curated, assessed, and valued according to their capacity to attract and hold a (presumed) masculine gaze, and women are trained, through this pervasive cultural organisation, to see their own bodies primarily through that externalised evaluative lens. A transfeminist reading adds: the same domains also enforce cisnormativity, measuring bodies against an imagined ‘natural’ template and treating some forms of gender expression as more real, more acceptable, and safer than others.
Self-objectification and its material costs
The psychological concept of self-objectification – first theorised by Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts in their 1997 ‘Objectification Theory’ – offers an empirically grounded account of what happens when people internalise the gaze. Fredrickson and Roberts argued that in cultures in which women’s bodies are pervasively treated as objects to be evaluated, women adopt what they call an ‘observer’s perspective’ on their own bodies: they learn to experience and monitor themselves from the outside, to prioritise their own appearance over their internal states, and to treat their bodies as instruments to be optimised for appearance rather than subjects to be inhabited for experience.
The usefulness of this framework becomes even clearer when we recognise that objectification is not applied evenly, and not only along a single axis. Many trans women and transfeminine people are pushed into heightened self-monitoring not simply because femininity is commodified, but because safety can depend on being read correctly. Where the gaze includes the threat of being ‘clocked’, self-surveillance takes on an additional layer: a constant scan for cues that might trigger misgendering, ridicule, exclusion, or violence. This is not vanity. It is, often, a survival response to a social environment that makes gender legibility a condition of basic dignity.
The empirical research generated by objectification theory has documented a range of consequences associated with higher levels of self-objectification: decreased performance on cognitive tasks (thought to result from the attentional demands of self-monitoring), diminished awareness of internal bodily states (hunger, physical arousal, fatigue), reduced sexual agency and pleasure, increased rates of body shame, appearance anxiety, disordered eating, and depression. These are not minor inconveniences; they represent substantial reductions in the quality and scope of women’s lives.
They are also distributed unequally: women of colour, women in high-image-visibility professions, and girls navigating puberty under conditions of intensified bodily scrutiny tend to show higher levels of self-objectification and its associated costs. A transfeminist account would add that trans girls and trans women, gender-nonconforming people, and some non-binary people experience intensified surveillance and anxiety through misgendering risk, gatekeeping in healthcare, workplace discrimination, and the ever-present demand to ‘prove’ who they are.
What objectification theory demonstrates empirically is what feminist theory has argued structurally: the externalisation of the gaze does something to people’s relationship to their own bodies that is specifically harmful. When the body becomes primarily an object to be viewed rather than a subject to be inhabited, when the primary question becomes ‘How do I look?’ rather than ‘How do I feel?’, something is lost – not incidentally but necessarily.
The person who is primarily occupied with managing their appearance has less attention for everything else: for sensation, for thought, for the world. In transfeminist terms, that loss can also include a loss of self-trust: a learned suspicion that one’s own felt knowledge of gender, comfort, and embodiment will be treated as less authoritative than strangers’ visual assessments.
Social media platforms have created new conditions for self-objectification that amplify and intensify its effects. The self-photography practices normalised by Instagram and similar platforms – the careful curation of selfies, the performance of life for an imagined audience, the metric feedback of likes and engagement – represent a quantification of the gaze that previous generations did not confront.
Research on social media and mental health has returned consistent findings of associations between image-based social media use and decreased body satisfaction, increased body comparison, and higher rates of depression and anxiety in girls and young women. These are structural consequences of platform design choices – the algorithmic amplification of engaging (which often means idealised, eroticised, and unattainably beautiful) content – that are misrepresented as individual pathologies or failures of self-esteem.
Again, a transfeminist lens sharpens the critique. Algorithmic beauty norms are also algorithmic gender norms: they reward a narrow, commercial femininity and treat gender variance as ‘off-brand’, suspicious, or unmonetisable unless it can be packaged as spectacle. Trans content is routinely subjected to disproportionate moderation, shadow-banning, harassment campaigns, and the ceaseless ‘debate’ over whether trans women are women – a debate staged not in abstract, but on bodies. The platform not only sexualises, but it sorts. It decides who is visible, who is ridiculed, who is reported, who is considered acceptable, and whose self-representation is treated as dangerous or deceptive.
The connection between self-objectification and diminished political participation deserves more sustained attention than it typically receives. Research in social psychology has suggested that self-objectification is associated not only with reduced cognitive performance and increased mental health risk, but with decreased political efficacy – the sense that one has the standing and capacity to act in the political world. This finding, though preliminary, is theoretically coherent: a person whose attention is substantially occupied with managing and monitoring their own appearance has less attentional and psychic resources for political engagement.
The panopticism of feminised bodies under contemporary visual culture is not only a personal burden; it functions, at the aggregate level, as a distributed drain on collective political capacity. This is not a conspiracy theory; it is a structural consequence of a system that has never been designed with women’s empowerment in mind – and, it should be said plainly, has also never been designed with trans survival and flourishing in mind.
The racial politics of the gaze
Any serious analysis of the gaze must account for its racial organisation. The male gaze is not racially neutral; it has historically been organised around a white aesthetic norm against which other bodies are measured and found deviant, exotic, or simply invisible. Black feminist theory has been particularly attentive to how the gaze operates differently on Black women’s bodies – the intersection of racial and gendered objectification producing a specific experience that cannot be reduced to either axis alone.
A transfeminist analysis insists that race and cisnormativity are often mutually reinforcing. Whose femininity is treated as ‘natural’ and whose is treated as ‘excessive’, ‘aggressive’, ‘fake’, or ‘deceptive’ is not merely a matter of gender. It is racialised. The demand for ‘softness’, ‘delicacy’, and ‘proper’ femininity has long been used to discipline Black women, to police the bodies of women of colour, and to mark some women as less womanly – and these same codes are frequently mobilised against trans women, particularly trans women of colour, who are disproportionately targeted by harassment and violence. The gaze does not simply look; it ranks.
Patricia Hill Collins’s concept of the ‘controlling images’ of Black womanhood – the mammy, the jezebel, the sapphire, the superwoman – provides a complementary framework to hooks’s oppositional gaze. Collins argues that these stereotyped visual representations are not merely offensive misrepresentations but active instruments of racial and gender domination: they organise the terms on which Black women are seen, and they structure the expectations that Black women must navigate in every domain of social life.
The Jezebel stereotype, which hypersexualises Black women and positions their sexuality as excessive and ungoverned, has real material consequences: it shapes how Black women are treated in medical contexts, in legal settings, in intimate relationships, and in workplaces. The gaze, here, is not merely aesthetic; it is juridical, medical, and economic. To challenge it requires not only producing counter-representations but dismantling the systems that give the controlling images their power. A transfeminist expansion would add: those same systems also structure how trans women are read, treated, and punished, and the consequences are often amplified where race, class, and gender variance intersect.
Asian women’s experience of the gaze has its own distinct genealogy. Orientalist visual traditions have constructed Asian femininity as simultaneously exotic and submissive, hyperfeminine and passive – a set of images that carries material consequences in the form of fetishisation that many Asian women regularly navigate in intimate and professional contexts.
It is important, here, not to collapse diverse histories: East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Central Asian women, and diasporic communities across different national contexts, are positioned differently within racial hierarchies and have been subjected to different colonial and migration regimes. Still, certain recurrent tropes – the geisha, the ‘lotus blossom’, the ‘dragon lady’, the mail-order bride – have operated across Western visual culture to discipline Asian femininity into a narrow script of availability, docility, and otherness.
The model minority myth, which positions Asian people as exemplary immigrants defined by discipline and achievement, intersects with gendered stereotypes in specific ways: the model minority Asian woman is expected to be accomplished but undemanding, visible in certain registers but not in others, desirable on the terms the dominant culture defines but not permitted to define desire on her own terms.
These histories of racialised visual representation are not addenda to a theory of the male gaze; they are constitutive of any adequate account of how vision, power, and feminised embodiment operate in relation to one another. They also intersect with cisnormativity: the demand that femininity be legible and non-threatening can render some Asian women hyper-visible as fetish objects while rendering others invisible as political subjects, and it can shape how trans and gender-nonconforming Asian people are read within and beyond their communities.
bell hooks’s essay ‘The Oppositional Gaze’ (1992) argues that the prohibition against looking – the historical punishment of Black people for looking directly at white people – created conditions in which the act of looking became politically charged, and in which Black women developed a critical, resistant gaze as a survival strategy. hooks traces the historical exclusion of Black women from mainstream cinema either as invisible or as stereotyped and degraded figures, and argues that this exclusion cultivated in Black female audiences a habit of critical spectatorship: a refusal to identify with the dominant subject position, a practice of looking at and questioning the racial and gendered politics of representation.
This critical gaze – the practice of looking at the conditions of looking itself – is a model not only for Black feminist media criticism but for any feminist approach to visual culture. It represents the possibility of a standpoint outside the dominant visual conventions, from which those conventions can be examined rather than simply inhabited. The development of such a standpoint does not require the position of the outsider; it requires the cultivation of critical consciousness, the willingness to ask who is looking, from where, and to whose benefit. For transfeminist politics, it also includes a further question: who is being asked to be legible on demand, and who is granted the ordinary privacy of ambiguity?
The beauty standard is never simply gendered; it is racialised, classed, and shaped by the specific history of Western colonialism and its aesthetics. The standard that positions thinness, whiteness, youth, and a particular set of features as universally beautiful is not a neutral aesthetic preference; it is the aesthetic of a specific power configuration, imposed as universal through the mechanisms of colonial cultural dominance.
Challenging the male gaze means, necessarily, challenging the racial organisation of the aesthetic – insisting that the standard is not universal but particular, not natural but historically produced, not inevitable but contestable. Challenging the cis gaze also means contesting the demand that bodies sort cleanly into two commercial templates – and acknowledging that ‘gender conformity’ is often treated as a beauty requirement in its own right.
Photography, art, and the female subject
The history of visual art in the Western tradition is largely a history of the female body as object of aesthetic pleasure – from the nude in Renaissance painting to the pin-up in twentieth-century popular culture, the female form has been the central object of visual culture, produced for a viewing subject whose masculinity was assumed. The ‘nude’, as Berger observed, is a convention that transforms the naked body of a woman into an aesthetic object organised for the pleasure of the viewer: the recumbent Venus, the languid odalisque, the idealised form whose gaze, if it exists at all, is directed outward toward the spectator whose look she invites.
Transfeminist critique asks us to notice how the ‘nude’ convention does more than eroticise a body: it makes claims about what counts as a ‘natural’ body at all. The museum has historically been a space where certain bodies are elevated as universal ideals, and others are either excluded or included only as ethnographic curiosities.
The politics of sex classification – whose body is treated as unremarkable, whose is treated as ‘ambiguous’, whose is treated as medical or monstrous – sits uncomfortably close to the history of the nude. A serious feminist visual politics cannot pretend that the policing of sexed embodiment is separate from the policing of gendered desirability; they are adjacent chapters of the same story, both invested in the authority to name the body from the outside.
Feminist artists from the 1970s onward have intervened in this tradition through a variety of strategies: reclaiming the body as subject rather than object, representing bodies that fall outside the aesthetic norm, turning the gaze back on the viewer, and making visible the conditions of visual pleasure itself.
Artists like Cindy Sherman, who photographed herself in the poses and costumes of film and art history’s female archetypes, made the constructed nature of feminine visual representation explicit – the body as theatre, the gaze as performance. The Guerrilla Girls, the anonymous feminist art collective, confronted the art world with statistics about the gender imbalance in museum collections, asking the pointed question: ‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?’
Contemporary photography, in the hands of photographers working explicitly from feminist, transfeminist, disability-justice, or intersectional political frameworks, has developed approaches to representing feminised embodiment that resist spectacularisation: images in which bodies are photographed in ways that emphasise agency, ordinariness, and materiality rather than aesthetic value; images in which the gaze is reciprocal or explicitly interrogated rather than one-directional; images that document the social conditions of bodies – their labour, their care work, their ageing, their illness – rather than their visual appeal.
These practices matter not only aesthetically but politically: they represent a sustained effort to develop visual languages in which women and feminised people can be seen on terms other than those the dominant culture has established. They do not solve the structural problem of the gaze, which requires institutional change as well as artistic intervention. But they create conditions of possibility – they demonstrate that it is possible to see differently, and they cultivate in viewers a critical consciousness about the conditions of seeing.
It is worth naming some of these practices concretely. Zanele Muholi, the South African visual activist, has produced an extensive body of photographic work documenting the lives of Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people in South Africa – work that insists on the visibility, dignity, and complexity of communities that dominant visual culture either ignores or renders in terms of violence and victimhood.
Muholi’s self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) is a sustained meditation on the politics of self-representation: in each image, Muholi uses found objects and materials to construct an elaborately staged self-portrait that engages directly with the history of the racialised gaze and refuses its terms. These are not images that invite the viewer to consume the subject; they are images that demand that the viewer reckon with the conditions of looking.
Photographers working within disability-justice frameworks have similarly challenged the terms on which disabled bodies are represented – pushing against both the pitying gaze that renders disability as tragedy and the inspirational-overcomer narrative that renders it as triumph, and insisting instead on images that simply inhabit the full complexity of a life. A transfeminist disability-justice perspective also notices how bodily difference is routinely routed through credibility tests: whose pain is believed, whose self-knowledge is trusted, whose body is treated as an object of expert interpretation rather than a person’s home. This is one of the points at which disability politics and trans politics meet: both confront medicalised gazes that claim authority over the body while denying the subject’s voice.
The emergence of community-based and participatory photography projects – in which the subject of the image is also its maker, or in which the terms of the project are shaped collaboratively between photographer and community – represents a further challenge to the unidirectional gaze of traditional documentary and art photography.
Projects that put cameras in the hands of Indigenous women, migrant workers, incarcerated people, and others who have been habitually photographed by outsiders on terms they did not set have produced bodies of work that challenge not only the specific representations of dominant visual culture but the power relations embedded in the act of photographic documentation itself. These are not only artistic interventions; they are political ones – assertions of the right to self-representation that connect directly to the broader feminist project of refusing the externally imposed gaze in favour of sovereign perception.
Toward a feminist visual politics
A feminist visual politics would need to operate at multiple levels simultaneously. At the level of representation, it would involve sustained critique and transformation of the visual conventions through which women’s and feminised bodies are displayed, evaluated, and consumed – in advertising, entertainment, social media, the museum, and the public sphere. At the level of political economy, it would involve attending to who owns the means of visual production, who profits from the idealisation and commodification of feminised bodies, and what structural changes are required to alter those ownership and profit relations.
At the level of subjectivity, it would involve developing practices and cultures that support women and feminised people in inhabiting their own bodies as subjects rather than objects – in attending to sensation rather than appearance, to feeling rather than display, to the body as the site of experience rather than the object of evaluation.
A transfeminist visual politics would add another necessary layer: confronting how cisnormativity is built into the institutions that govern visibility. That includes media industries that treat trans women as either a punchline or a threat; platforms whose moderation systems are inconsistent and easily weaponised; workplace cultures that discipline gender expression; and state institutions that make legal recognition contingent on compliance with medical or bureaucratic criteria. It also includes the mundane, everyday practices of ‘gender checking’ – staring, questioning, correcting, speculating – through which strangers feel entitled to audit a person’s gender. These are not isolated acts of rudeness. They are micro-enforcements of a macro-regime: the demand that gender be visually legible and socially policed.
None of these levels is sufficient alone. Representation can be diversified without changing the political economy of visual culture; the political economy can be redistributed without changing the subjective habits of perception that the previous regime installed. Transformation at each level reinforces and enables transformation at the others, which is why feminist visual politics has characteristically operated across theory, practice, and organising simultaneously.
The question of how women see themselves – how they look in the mirror, what they notice, what they value, what they feel – is, finally, not simply a psychological question. It is a question about the conditions under which selfhood is possible.
A selfhood organised entirely around the internalised gaze of an evaluating other – around the question ‘How do I appear?’ rather than ‘How do I experience?’ – is a selfhood partial and constrained. Transfeminist politics sharpen this point by reminding us that evaluating others is not always erotic; it is often disciplinary.
For many trans and gender-nonconforming people, the mirror is not only a site of beauty labour, but a site of risk assessment: will I be read correctly, will I be safe, will I be treated as real?
The philosopher Iris Marion Young, in her essay ‘Throwing Like a Girl’, offered a phenomenological account of how women’s bodily comportment – the way they inhabit and move through physical space – is structured by a specifically feminine mode of being that differs fundamentally from the comportment available to men.
Young observed that women in patriarchal societies tend to inhabit their bodies as encumbrances rather than as instruments of engagement with the world – they hold themselves in, restrict their movements, and approach physical tasks with a diffidence that reflects not incapacity but a learned modesty about occupying space. This modesty is the bodily correlate of the surveyed self: the woman who has internalised the gaze moves through the world as though always being watched, and her body reflects that knowledge in every gesture.
Young’s analysis connects the politics of vision to the phenomenology of embodiment in ways that are clarifying and, for feminist visual politics, important. The project of challenging the male gaze is not only a project of changing representations; it is a project of transforming the bodily habits – the habituated ways of holding, moving, and experiencing the body – that the regime of visual surveillance has produced.
This is a longer and more intimate transformation than any change in visual culture alone can accomplish: it involves, in Bourdieu’s terms, the transformation of the habitus – of the deeply embodied dispositions through which we experience and act in the world. The feminist politics of vision must therefore include not only critique and counter-representation but the cultivation of practices – movement, dance, sport, touch, the simple permission to take up space – through which women and feminised people can inhabit their bodies differently.
A transfeminist extension clarifies that ‘taking up space’ is not a metaphor. For trans women, trans men, and non-binary people, public space is often the site where gender is policed most aggressively: bathrooms, changing rooms, schools, workplaces, streets, and online comment sections that function like streets. The right to occupy space without audit, without interrogation, without the background hum of threat is unevenly distributed. In this sense, sovereign perception is inseparable from sovereign presence: being able to perceive yourself as real, whole, and entitled to your body requires conditions in which your existence is not constantly contested.
That is not a small project. The gaze has a long history and many institutional supports. But the history of feminist visual culture is also the history of women looking back – at the conditions of representation, at the politics of pleasure, at the systems that organise their visibility on terms not their own – and in that looking, finding the ground from which something else can be built.
The mirror is not the problem; the question is who holds it, and in whose interest it has been made. A transfeminist answer insists: the mirror must belong to the subject. Not because self-perception is a private luxury, but because the right to define oneself – to be seen without being reduced, to be legible without being policed, to be complex without being punished – is a political condition of any liveable freedom.
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