Top Rank Magazine

This summer, an exhibition opened at the Museum of Sex in New York City titled NSFW: Female Gaze . Organized in collaboration with Vice’s Creators platform, and on view through April 2018, this show includes the work of 25 young and/or emerging female artists. The show’s two part title invokes Laura Mulvey’s canonical 1975 feminist film theory about the masculine cinematic perspective, as well as the everyday politics of internet censorship and sexual respectability. However, this exhibition’s title presents an important and timely question: What is the “female gaze” and what about it is “unsafe”? A “female gaze”—or any gaze for that matter—is cultural and learned, not innate, not universal, but intensely subjective and situated by race, class, and history. On Episode 10, co-hosts Marcel