Abstract
A woman walks down the street, senses the gaze of a male other, and turns around to see an empty
street where she is the sole pedestrian. The male other’s immediate presence is made real through her
sense experience of him. This feeling is not unrooted, however, she recalls memories of being taught by
parents, teachers, and peers that her body is for another rather than for herself—seen in cases of
catcalling, dress coding and strict parental discipline of the daughter’s body. This paper studies the
practice of internalizing the male other’s gaze and investigates the conditions preceding its
(involuntary) adoption. The contemporary tragedy of Nex Benedict and the ancient drama of
Antigone demonstrate the necessity of enacting prescribed social mores and gender rituals. The diverse
thought of feminist phenomenology and Hegelian dialectics enables me to arrive at a conclusion where
I understand the feminine self as in perpetual flux, where one is made, remade, watched, rewatched,
visible and hidden. There is no beyond these conditions of construction and reconstruction and so
long as women exist as a social category, we will be misrecognized, represented, invisible, on display, all
at once, or never at all.