How Do I Look: In Search of the Female Gaze

Abstract

This thesis is an investigation of the point at which many tween and teenage girls “give their gaze away” – to boys and men, to the market, even to each other – thereafter viewing, and indeed conceiving of, themselves from the outside in. How Do I Look? examines this loss of what might be termed “primary perspective,” with its attendant depletion of agency, confidence and direction through a creative nonfiction form that interweaves interview material with a thread of memoir.