The Female Gaze

Rita Banerjee’s essay in three parts, “The Female Gaze,” is an excerpt from her memoir and manifesto on how young women of color keep their cool against social, sexual, and economic pressure. In her essay exploring the female gaze, female agency, and female cool, Banerjee asks:

What if women, especially women of color, were the progenitors of cool? That is, did women have to cultivate their own cool—their own sense of style, creative expression, and coldness—in order to survive patriarchy across millennia across cultures? If the male gaze aims subordinate and colonize, what does the female gaze, tempered by cool, desire? What does the female gaze cherish or hold dear? If a woman were fully aware of her gaze, would she use it to objectify and colonize, or could her gaze destabilize and decolonize?

Cover Image of Tripti Chakravarty’s memoir, Duur Nikat, Nikat Duur (i.e. Distant: Nearby, Nearby: far-away; Dey’s Publishing, 1995). Rita Banerjee’s grandmother, Tripti Chakravarty, was a Sanskrit scholar, English teacher, and school principal. She was well-versed in Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu, and published Bengali essays, short stories, and poems in feminist magazines and popular journals like Desh.

In 2016, at a master class at the Toronto International Film Festival, Jill Soloway, the director and producer of Transparent who recently comes out as transgender, tackles Laura Mulvey’s famous and electrifying essay, “Visual Cinema and Narrative Pleasure.” In 1975, Mulvey introduces the term “male gaze” and describes how scopophilia fetishizes the female body on screen and transforms a woman into an object of pleasure, voyeurism, and eroticism for the male viewer.

Soloway wonders if the female gaze is simply the opposite of the male gaze. That is, is the female gaze simply “visual arts and literature depicting the world and men from a feminine point of view, presenting men as objects of female pleasure?”

Soloway digs further. The female gaze might actually have an identity of its own. An independence, an agency. “The female gaze might be…

I. A way of feeling and seeing, which tries to get inside the protagonist especially when the protagonist is not cis-male. A subjective camera. Reclaiming the body and using it as a tool of the self with intention to communicating a feeling-seeing.
II. Demonstrate how it feels to be the object of the gaze.
III. Return the gaze. Daring to say, ‘I see you seeing me.’”

I. A Way of Feeling and Seeing

Nani had a fascination for airplanes. Perhaps, her most famous and accessible publication is a book called Duur Nikat, Nikat Duur (i.e. Distant: Nearby, Nearby: far-away), a memoir she writes about her early life growing up in a village with her young siblings and then after marriage, how she became a young English teacher in the hill-station town of Ranchi with a medley of unruly students. This is the summary of the book she tells to our relatives and friends. But secretly the book is about travel. About her adventures crisscrossing the world on airlines starting in her fifties and beyond. She’s my grandmother with cat glasses and a crooked smile.

She instills in me an unshakeable wanderlust, and a desire to know the world.

* * *

Tonima, my great aunt, a cousin-in-marriage of my grandmother passes away the day I fly to Granada. I am in transit when I hear the news. My mother’s voice, usually so light and lilting, seems void of emotion on the phone that day.

“Are you okay, Sona?” Her words are automatic, carefully chosen, too full of concern. She doesn’t even have to name her emotion to convey it.

“What’s wrong?”

“Thuna Aunty, she—”

“She’s in the hospital?”

“No.”

“She’s gone?”

“Yes.”

I’m in Spain the day her funeral takes place. The olive trees skirting gardens and hotels of the Alhambra seem full of ghosts. On the grounds, the trees are sparse. Their branches glow lime-like, pale, with leaves in the lightest shades of green. The day is arid, and the red earth overheated. The sky seems almost white today.

As I walk through the trees, I can almost hear her words and laughter. Tonima could laugh through anything. She was a lovely remedy for a broken heart.

The first time I recall meeting her was sometime in the mid-80’s when my parents had decided to settle permanently in New Jersey and leave the rolling hills and sunshine of California behind.

I had just spent the year traveling with my grandmother, Nani. We flew from San Francisco to Bangkok to Ranchi and back. Well, almost back. Somehow, we landed in central Jersey instead of sunny California. I was barely four years old when the journey started, and now, it was just after New Year’s in 1987.

A bear with the new year emblazoned on its knitted cap greets me at the airport. It’s my marker of lost time. I recognize my mom and dad in the airport, too, and do hug them when my mom opens her arms and offers me the bear. But before I rush into their embrace, I hesitate.

Emotions, for me, are not given freely. A certain coolness enters into the embrace.

Tonima Aunty, though, breaks through any icy heart. She insists that everyone call her Thuna, her pet-name, which in Bengali, sounds nothing like a type of fish.

I meet her for the first time, a few weeks after I’ve been in New Jersey. She seems to materialize out of thin air in the middle of the night. It’s pitch dark outside and most of our neighbors and fellow apartment tenants are asleep. Tonima enters with her two young boys in tow. Her husband hides the car somewhere off-screen.

I should be sleeping. I might have been sleeping. But I pad into the living room in my pajamas and watch as this strange women turns into an acrobat before my eyes.

One of her sons, Abhik, who looks nerdy in his glasses, is tall and shy and several years older than me. Bikram, her other son, who looks like his dad with a mop of black hair is closer to my age. I look at him and think that he could be a best friend.

That evening in Edison, Thuna Aunty seems to be wrestling with her two sons in mid-air. She walks into the room, carrying one under each armpit and laughs. The boys laugh, too. One seems to roll over her back to get free, the other tries to flee by crawling on the carpet. She manages to catch both of them in her arms. How she does it is beyond me. I watch her laugh and juggle and juggle.

Her eyes settle on me. There’s so much mischief in her gaze. I like that look. It’s cool.

Is this what it means to be a woman? I think, and smile as her hand reaches out to me.

* * *

Nani composes most of her memoirs in Wales, over a summer that stretches into a year or two, at my uncle Raju’s home. During the day, she cooks lunch for the family and takes care of my cousins, and each afternoon and evening when the children are off—to school, to play, to bed—she composes her book.

When it’s finally published, she’s taken by surprise. One of her cousins submits it to a Kolkata publisher on her behalf. The publisher decides to change the title of her book to something more “catchy.” Duur Nikat, Nikat Duur (i.e. Distant: Nearby, Nearby: far-away.) sticks even through Nani protests the change loudly.

The first chapter begins with an epistolary letter. The speaker is addressing her newly diagnosed disease, questioning god, and her own impending confrontation with mortality. But the speaker also sports a barbed-tongue. She looks at her fate and turns her head away. Tripti Chakravarty, my grandmother, writes:

I look up from my reading and turn to my mother.

“I didn’t know Nani flew to Jordan.”

“She didn’t,” my mother says, stirring in okra and mustards seeds into the sambar she is making.

“But her memoir here says that she stayed overnight in Jordan, and that one of the flight attendants confiscated her passport.”

“Let me see that,” my mother wipes her hands dry on a towel and reads the first page of the story.

“Well, Nani didn’t have cancer either,” she points to the first line, “this is clearly a work of fiction.” She takes out a glass full of chili peppers from the cupboard and starts chopping them.

“Are you sure? I’m pretty sure she told everyone it was a memoir. She mentions uncle Rana and Raju’s names here, too.”

My mother lays down her knife. Her ears prick at the mention of her brother’s nick-names. “And not mine?”

“Nope.”

She looks ready to grab the book again but stops.

“See,” she says, resuming her chopping, “it’s a work of fiction.”

I tap the spine of the book and watch her for a moment.

“Can it be both?”

* * *

Between the ages of twelve and fourteen, I read more Thomas Hardy novels than any sane child ever should. The fascination begins in part because of Thuna Aunty. She studied English Honors at the University of Calcutta and knows all the classics by heart.

Under her tutelage, I race through The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess d’Urbervilles. I start reading Jude the Obscure, and think I’m going to barf.

“What’s wrong?” Thuna Aunty asks me at a dinner party hosted at her new house in Westchester County. The house is decorated with artifacts Thuna Aunty has acquired in Mexico, Saudi Arabia, England, and India. She’s lived in all of these places with her family.

“What’s England like?” I try to avoid the question. Thuna Aunty and her sons were recently living in London. I hear that Abhik and Bikram even had to go to boarding schools for a bit, and I can’t imagine what they’d look like in tailored shorts, navy ties, and green jackets.

“It’s gray,” she sits down at the bed next to me, “and cloudy. Far more cloudy than here.”

“Really?” It’ll be a few months before I turn fourteen and fly to India via London for my middle school graduation trip. I’ve never been to Europe, and never stepped foot outside of Asia and North America.

“Yes,” she smiles, black eyes twinkling like jewels, “but they have Chicken Tikka Masala there!”

“What’s that?” I ask in all my worldliness.

“It’s England’s national dish, Mistu,” she laughs, hand over mouth, head thrown back. She laughs and laughs until I join her in the joke and my eyes start watering.

“But seriously,” she pauses for a moment, “tell me about Hardy.”

“Thomas?” I feel like I’m about to spill my secrets about a boy I just can’t get out of my mind.

“The one and only,” Thuna aunty winks at me, switching from Bengali to English like a pro.

“I love and hate his novels.”

“Meaning?” Her eyes grow wide.

“Meaning, I can’t stand his novels.”

“Don’t you love his language? His characters? His stories?”

“Yes, of course, his language rocks,” I flick my wrist to emphasize the point. “But Tess and the Mayor’s wife. And then his daughter—”

“What about them?”

“They’re so unreal!”

“Unreal?”

“Do you think a female writer would write, ‘Out of the frying-pan into the fire!’ as a bunch of farmers watch Tess climb onto the back of Alex d’Urbervilles stallion, knowing that she will soon be raped by him?”

“What would a woman writer write?”

“Nothing so condescending, so righteous, so masculine.”

“How would you write the story?”

“I’d have Tess narrate her own.”

* * *

In Seattle, during my MFA, I learn Bengali so that I can learn to finally read my grandmother’s words. What draws me to Nani’s work is how her writing reveals what she sees in the world, how the world sees her, and how she is able to articulate her response.

In the first memoir/fiction story from her book, the speaker describes having her passport confiscated by one of the security guards at the Queen Alia International Airport in Amman. She is then ushered to a hotel to stay overnight. The guard doesn’t explain to her why he takes her passport, and ignores her when she says she’s sick. The night is spent in something like a fever dream. The speaker can’t get the medication she needs, and no one offers to help. Her body is sick. But society seems to be ailing, too. She recites Hamlet’s soliloquy sometime in the middle of the night. As if Shakespeare can save the day. But then she sleeps. Perhaps, she dreams. The day breaks.

In the morning, she is ushered to the tarmac where there is a new airplane awaiting to take her to Berlin.

On her way to the airplane, she carries her baggage but has no passport in hand.

The same security guard who confiscated her passport the day before stands next to the buzzing plane on the tarmac. When the speaker sees him, she makes a beeline in his direction. Fever and mortality forgotten for the moment.

I read the passage out loud to my mother, and she throws her hands up while cooking.

“What absolute bullshit,” she replies.

“What do you mean?” I say, laughing, “it’s hilarious.”

“My mother didn’t know when to start writing and when to stop.” She turns back to her cooking and dismisses the book.

I try to stop laughing and wipe the tear from my eye. I take Nani’s book to my office to continue reading. What intrigues me most about the passage is not the beauty of her story or the lucidity of her language, or her fascination with craft, but her inadvertent description of the female gaze.

She heats up and rebukes the security officer for confiscating her passport, the emblem and agent of her female gaze. Without her passport, she has to stop her journey. And the one hampering her path is, by no surprise, a man. The fight she has on the tarmac with the officer is existential. She’s trying to gain back her own agency, her own agenda, and her own ability to explore and map the world.

For Nani, the female gaze is intrinsically linked to travel, to world-building, to world-knowing. From her fifties to her eighties, she jetted around the world. Traveling from Ranchi and Kolkata to Amman and London and New York and San Francisco and Tokyo and Bangkok and back. She spoke six languages fluently, and could read and write in several. She became an English teacher when she couldn’t find work as a Sanskritist. She spoke in Hindi and Santali to the adivasis in Bihar.

But most of all, she had an insatiable wanderlust. She wanted to see the world and recreate it in her own language. She wanted to know what was beyond her point of view, and see if she could continue to alter it. She wanted to encounter, argue, and brush up against others. Her gaze was ironic, curious, and always questing.

__________

Rita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing program at the George Polk School of Communications at Long Island University Brooklyn. She is author of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing,Echo in Four Beats, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA from the University of Washington, and her work appears in Hunger Mountain, Isele, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre (2022), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays.