N°8
June 2024
IN Gaze N°8 : A SPECIAL ON “teen spirit”, the rebellious mindset that inhabits us through our teenage years and sometimes never leaves us.
Essay
wallpapers, posters and used lipgloss
As a repository of memories, secrets and feelings, they bear witness to the construction of female identity. Delving into the sociology behind teenage bedrooms. —Text: Pauline Allione. Photos: Kahina At Amrouche.
Profile
Marley dias, activism 101
Marley Dias is anything but your average college sophomore. An activist since the sixth grade, she is the founder of the #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign and at 19, she’s just getting started. —Text: Najwa Gause. Photos: Rania Matar.
Love letter
ANISSA MAILLE
In each issue, we publish a woman’s love letter to herself. With the whole world working against our self-esteem, it’s time to make our own declaration of self-love: a revolutionary act that’s just as difficult to do, as it can be life-changing. —Text: Anissa Maille. —Photo: Martina Bertacchi.
Female legacy
Little women
With just 19 years between Annabelle and Elidjah, their mother-daughter
bond is unshakeable. For Annabelle, a former single parent now with a blended family, the desire to be a mother goes back to her teens. —Text: Mélissa Chidiad. Photos: Clélia Odette.
Essay
Teenage dreams
Taous Merakchi got through adolescence using teen films to soothe the pain of growing up as a marginalised girl, who identified more with the unloved outsiders than the lead characters. As she grew up, the films became antidotes to the adult world. —Text: Taous Merakchi. Photos: Laura Lafon Cadilhac.
Portfolio
one summer
In pictures as tender as a love note scrawled in Tipp-Ex on an Eastpack backpack, Marion Poussier captures the very essence of the teen spirit. The unique passing of time, the trial and error, the boredom, the racing hearts, and all those tiny moments when it seems that everything is at stake. —Photos: Marion Poussier.
Icon
Billie Eilish: happier than ever
From teen star to teen icon, Billie Eilish is the voice of a generation under pressure. As reports warns of the deteriorating mental health of girls in Western countries, the singer’s lyrics resonate more than ever, helping teenage girls to put into words what they are going through. For Maddy, a Billie Eilish super fan, her idol is helping her to feel understood. —Words: Madison Benjamin.
Essay
Strange creatures
Adolescence transforms our relationship with ourselves and the world around us. But what does such a huge shift represent for someone who is still a child? Like thousands of other little girls every year, Taline Oundjian experienced precocious puberty. She opens up about a pivotal time in her life. —Text: Taline Oundjian. Photo: Hellen Van Meene.
Archive
Aloïse Sauvage
There are moments that we record carefully so we can look back and see how far we’ve come. Even as a teen, French artist Aloïse Sauvage’s determination was already clear. She talks about her fond memories of a time before she had even started, yet everything was already twice as important.
Eye contact
Anouchka, Clémentine, Inès, Line et Noémie are all aged between 12 and 17. With artists Romy Berger and Alice Pallot, they learn photography. When we invited them to make a series of pictures for Gaze, they came back right away with the idea of exploring a subject that occupies many a young mind: love. And the way they see it is a lot more nuanced than we had imagined.
Culture list
What to Read, watch, listen to
The Gaze team gives you its female gaze cultural recommendations for continuing the "teen spirit" theme.
Readers’ testimonies
“What would you tell your teen self?”
That's what we asked our readers, to allow them a look back in time. We share their answers in a notebook.
Also in this issue...
Also in this issue...
Art Herstory
Suzanne and the elders
What if we re-wrote part of art history, to give voice to the women in paintings? In this issue, we tell the story of a woman who, one day, had the bad luck to take a bath. —Text: Julie Beauzac. Photo: Oihana Ospital.
Focus
Butch lover
The photographer Roman Manfredi travelled the length and breadth of the UK in search of butch lesbians; the gay women who present a masculine identity which is systematically caricatured. The project is a bid to capture all the nuance and subtlety that characterises them. —Photos: Roman Manfredi. Text: Clarence Edgard-Rosa.
Portfolio
Divine Ascension
In this dreamlike series of photographs, light is as virtual as it is celestial, as the Peruvian artist Prin Rodriguez seeks to revive the mythology around the sacred mountain of Pariacaca, one of the founding stories in the history of her country. —Photos: Prin Rodiguez.
Headstrong
Marie patouillet
If there’s one thing that world Para-Cycling champion Marie Patouillet is even better at than cycling, it’s pushing the world of sport towards greater inclusivity. We meet her as she starts her final lap of the track. —Text: Natacha Basdevant. Photos: Anne-Sophie Soudoplatoff.
Flash forward
The late dawn
In each issue of Gaze, a different author takes a deep dive into the futur with an original piece of speculative fiction. This time, Meryem Alqamar takes us to the year 2064, in which the queer community is refusing to be left behind. —Text: Meryem Alquamar. Illustrations: Margaux Dinam.
Personal Pantheon
Lina soualem
Who would feature in your own pantheon of inspiring women? Filmmaker Lina Soualem shares hers.
