French Literature Reviews - 2026

Azélie Fayolle, Subverting the Male Gaze
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 domination. We reread Ovid, Molière, Laclos, Maupassant, Zola, and others with fresh eyes. The hegemony of the male gaze is literally cracking in every possible direction through the female gaze, feminist gaze, lesbian gaze, animal gaze, child gaze, and so on—each offering a way to subvert virilism, disrupt norms, and queer narratives, opening 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 hindered and shaped 19th-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 concept of the male gaze has long been central to feminist literary criticism and cultural studies, describing how artistic and literary traditions construct their subjects from a predominantly masculine viewpoint. Scholars in these fields examine how canonical works establish normative expectations around gender, power, and representation. By tracing this dynamic across various historical periods, researchers investigate the mechanisms through which dominant cultural paradigms are sustained and internalized by readers over generations.

Readers interested in feminist literary theory and the evolution of narrative perspectives may find this study relevant. The volume engages with a broad range of texts from Greco-Roman antiquity to contemporary writing, reflecting ongoing scholarly conversations about gender representation in literature and the emergence of pluralistic reading practices that challenge established aesthetic hierarchies.