Gazing is also a Form of Power.

video,2023

Foucault, in discussing power, mentioned that "Discourse is Power," and the direct manifestation of the damage and suppression of women's power in history is the loss of women's discourse. Whether it is within the "small- scale patriarchal society" of the family, where men as heads of the household hold absolute discursive power, or in the workplace where women are placed in secondary positions and suffer rights violations through reproductive roles, all demonstrate the suppression of women's "discourse." In the book "How to Suppress Women's Writing," various ways and reasons for suppressing women's writing are mentioned, and the lack of educational opportunities, poverty, and fragmented time caused by various domestic obligations are just the tip of the iceberg. "If women's experiences are considered inferior, trivial, or 'narrow and shallow' compared to men's experiences, then the devaluation of women's writing is inevitable." These difficulties still persist today.

The theory of feminine writing proposed by Hélène Cixous suggests that women's writing is inclusive and filled with possibilities. Writing is a means to awaken women's subjectivity by embodying feminine qualities through bodily writing, advocating for the construction of a language expression system belonging to women, and forming a mode of women's writing. It enables women to break free from the roles of the silent and the written, and to raise their own voices. By incorporating themselves into texts, women become "active" writers, just as they embed their struggles into the world and history. The presence of women as subjects in texts marks the beginning of women reclaiming their discursive power. Women's voices emerge in texts and then transition into reality; their emotions and inner selves are expressed autonomously, breaking the silence of women in traditional texts and returning to, or rather creating, true female subjectivity. Women's writing is a weapon for women to speak up for themselves, but it goes beyond mere expression and becomes a valuable attempt to dismantle the binary opposition under patriarchal society.

To some extent, we cannot fully theorize how an author begins writing because writing often starts with the flow of emotions, the stimulation of feelings, and the need for exploration. Although this inspiration does not arise out of thin air, it is a sensory and vague understanding of one's own roots. Language is not a fixed structure but a process of symbolic representation by the subject. Cixous believes that any societal transformation and new interaction must first involve a change in language. Women's writing also originates from the voices and bodies of mothers, from songs without words. They abandon the refinement of language and instead embrace the urge to write in counter-language. This is a breakthrough against the language system and oppression of patriarchy.

I use the video as a medium to showcase the male gaze on women in patriarchal society, both in everyday life and within the language system. Writing erotic novels from a male perspective with women as the object of description, or male judgments filled with voyeuristic and conquering desires based on women's appearances and abilities. Through mediums such as visuals, and written texts, I aim to present these phenomena to the public, shifting the male gaze from subject to object.