French Literature Reviews - 2026

Azélie Fayolle, Subverting the Male Gaze: Literature for Both Halves of the World
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics

The male gaze shapes our collective imagination, sexualizes bodies, downplays violence, and compartmentalizes knowledge. Throughout our literature—from essential classics to cursed poets, from Greco-Roman antiquity to contemporary essays—we encounter this pervasive male perspective that normalizes and aestheticizes male dominance. Ovid, Molière, Laclos, Maupassant, Zola, and others are revisited with a fresh eye. The hegemony of the male gaze is literally fracturing in every possible direction through the female gaze, feminist gaze, lesbian gaze, animal gaze, child gaze, and more—each offering a way to subvert virilism, disrupt the status quo, and queer narratives to open up a plurality of possible worlds and stories of emancipation.

Azélie Fayolle is a literature researcher. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Philixte), she joined the CNRS (CELLF). Her research focuses on feminist literatures and epistemologies, literary theories, and the ways in which the concept of nature has both hindered and shaped nineteenth-century emancipatory movements and their texts. She also hosts a YouTube channel, Un grain de lettres. She previously published her first essay with Divergences, Des femmes et du style. Pour un feminist gaze (2023).

The critique of canonical literature through the lens of gender and representation forms a well-established area of inquiry within literary theory and feminist criticism. Scholars in these fields frequently examine how traditional narratives sustain patriarchal ideologies and how alternative perspectives can challenge established aesthetic norms. Azélie Fayolle is a literature researcher whose work engages with works spanning from Greco-Roman antiquity to contemporary essays, interrogating the ways familiar texts construct and perpetuate dominant viewpoints.

The text explores alternative vantage points, including the female, feminist, lesbian, animal, and child gazes. Readers interested in contemporary feminist approaches to literature and the history of cultural representation may find it a relevant contribution to these discussions. The work also examines canonical authors and figures while considering how narrative structures can be disrupted to open up new interpretations and emancipatory possibilities within literary studies.