Male Gaze in Doris Lessing’s “A Woman on a Roof” and Duygu Asena’s Kadının Adı Yok

Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze has been employed to examine women’s representation across cultural and artistic contexts. Extending this framework, the article brings Mulvey’s theory into dialogue with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of the gaze to argue that gaze functions not merely as a visual practice but as a formative mechanism that shapes gendered subjectivity from childhood to adulthood. Focusing on Doris Lessing’s A Woman on a Roof and Duygu Asena’s Kadının Adı Yok, the study identifies a structural parallel: in both texts, the female protagonists remain unnamed and are subjected to the regulating gaze of men within English and Turkish patriarchal societies. Employing a close reading methodology informed by feminist literary criticism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the analysis demonstrates that the gaze operates as a pervasive mechanism of surveillance, objectification, and domination, reducing women to passive objects of desire while denying their full subjectivity. Drawing on Lacan’s theory of the gaze as a process of objectifying the other, the article argues that the male gaze extends beyond literary representation to reproduce unequal power relations and reinforce structural gender inequalities. These dynamics have material consequences, restricting women’s access to authority, public visibility, and professional advancement despite their formal inclusion within social institutions. Simultaneously, both narratives portray acts of resistance through which the unnamed protagonists challenge the authority of the gaze, reject objectification, and reclaim agency. By synthesizing Mulvey’s feminist critique with Lacan’s theory of subject formation, the article contributes to feminist literary criticism by conceptualizing the gaze as both a symbolic and material mechanism of patriarchal control and a contested site of female resistance. Ultimately, the study demonstrates how literature exposes the ideological foundations of gendered oppression while imagining alternative forms of female subjectivity and autonomy that disrupt the authority of the male gaze across different cultural contexts and settings today.