Description
Abstract:
This article reconceptualises the gaze as a relational, reflected, and negated process embedded in everyday life. Drawing on 13 in-depth interviews with married women in urban China, this study examines how women navigate dominant beauty norms associated with straight male aesthetics, a culturally specific articulation of heteronormative ideals that emphasise youth, fairness, and slimness. While existing feminist scholarship has theorised the gaze as either externally imposed (male gaze) or internally regulated (disciplinary gaze), these frameworks often overlook how women actively engage with multiple, overlapping expectations of evaluation in intimate contexts. We introduce the concept of the negotiated gaze to capture how women interpret, accommodate, and contest expectations from partners, digital media and broader beauty culture. Findings show that beauty operates simultaneously as aesthetic and emotional labour, shaping women’s sense of visibility, desirability, and relational stability. Women’s practices are neither reducible to compliance nor resistance but reflect ongoing negotiation within unequal gendered power relations. By extending gaze theory into the domain of heterosexual intimacy, this article demonstrates how agency emerges as relational, situated, and ambivalent. The concept of the negotiated gaze offers a framework for understanding how beauty, power, and subjectivity are co-constructed in contemporary gender relations.