What is it like to see, not from the point of view of film director Clint Eastwood, or the male protagonist of his Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), but from the point of view of one of the people caught in the camera’s gaze-the trans woman The Lady Chablis? 4 What is the cis gaze to that which is in so many ways its most negative object? In the context in which I work and play, this would be something like the black, queer, femme, trans body. I want to think beyond how ambivalent desires and anxieties structure the field of vision around race, sexuality, and gender, and decenter the sovereignty of the gaze itself. It’s no longer possible to think about the gender of the gaze without also thinking about race. I want to think, and feel, and imagine from outside of it. I don’t want to think from the point of view of this dominating, controlling, and yet fragile cis perspective, nor even to critique it. I want to focus not so much on the male gaze, but on the cis gaze-a looking that harbors anxiety about the slippages and transformations between genders, but which also harbors desires for those transitions as well. Who does she become in the structure of the male gaze? To the trans woman spectator, the woman on screen that is both castrated and castrating might be the very thing to be desired. 2 I want to set that aside to ask about the trans woman spectator. Mulvey even suggested elsewhere that there’s a kind of transsexuality to the female spectator within the male gaze when she misrecognizes herself in the male protagonist. Plenty of screen theory also plays out what spectatorship is like for cis women, or for gay people. That she might be castrating is not desirable-at least for the male gaze of a straight cis man. She might take it from him! That she is castrated is desirable. But this pleasure is undercut by an anxiety: the woman he desires is desirable because, in Freudian language, she lacks something. The male gaze sees through the male protagonist on the screen, misrecognizing itself through his conquests of worlds and women. Cinema offers the particular pleasure of that desire in seeing without being seen.

For Mulvey, the spectator’s point of view is structured by heterosexual male desire. 1 Her examples are all from classic Hollywood cinema, but the term has a wider application. In a much-cited essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey gave us a useful way of thinking about how we see: the male gaze.

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