The Gaze

by Elif Shafak

First published 2000

Amazon

3.4(4,633)

In contemporary Istanbul, an obese woman and her dwarf lover reverse the gendered performances imposed on them: she draws a moustache on her face while he wears make-up and records a Dictionary of Gazes. Their attempt to control how strangers see them reveals that looking is never neutral and that shame can be produced by curiosity as readily as by open cruelty.

Their story is intertwined with earlier spectacles, including an 1880s Istanbul freak show built around bodies marketed as unusual. The shifting narratives move through desire, humiliation, fantasy and public exhibition, asking who has the authority to define normality. Because the historical strand belongs to the late Ottoman city, that controlled context is used without treating the entire novel as a conventional period narrative.