Since the 1990s, harem dramas have become a culturally distinctive Chinese film and television genre, presenting historical events or characters in ancient China. As a subgenre of historical dramas, harem dramas primarily focus on the lives of concubines in ancient China, delving into their complex love stories, political power struggles, and interpersonal conflicts (Cai, 2017, p. 29). In China, well-produced courtroom harem dramas have become cultural phenomena, such as Jade Palace Lock Heart (《宮鎖心玉》2011), Treading On Thin Ice (《步步驚心》2011), Legend of Zhen Huan (《甄嬛傳》2011), The Empress of China (《武媚娘傳奇》2014), The Legend of Miyue (《羋月傳》2015; hereafter referred to as LM), Story of Yanxi Palace (《延禧攻略》2018; hereafter referred to as SYP), and Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace (《如懿傳》2018; hereafter referred to as RRLP). Among these, Legend of Zhen Huan (also translated as Empresses in the Palace; hereafter referred to as LZH) has been particularly prominent and popular for over a decade, having considerable influence on contemporary culture. Even now, an identical style of network expression known as “Zhen Huan style,” named after the drama’s main character, can still be seen in discussions of trending topics and in self-made memes by local audiences (Yan et al., 2020, p. 449).

As a unique genre in China, harem drama reflects associated social and cultural changes. The stimulation of watching harem dramas reflects aesthetic values, social emotions, and public discourse, establishing a relationship between the individual and the community. Although harem drama was originally intended to attract female audiences, it has become popular among male audiences and has remained a topic for over a decade (Hongxiu, 2019).

However, there is a theoretical gap in understanding why so many male audiences are involved in this cultural phenomenon, particularly regarding the essential characteristics of the male audience of harem drama. To address this gap, this study turns to male gaze theory in order to foreground the feminist crisis embedded within what appears as male fascination. Drawing on a triangulated methodological design, the research integrates in depth interviews, content analysis of harem dramas, and a critical review of existing scholarship, allowing different forms of evidence to enter into dialogue. Against this backdrop, it asks what cultural ideologies sustain male engagement with harem dramas, and how such modes of looking may be interpreted from a feminist perspective. It further examines whether gay male viewers and heterosexual male viewers display systematic differences in their ways of engaging with the gendered visual narratives of harem dramas, particularly with regard to patterns of looking and affective response.

In order to answer these questions, this research adopts a triangulation methodology, integrating in-depth interviews, qualitative content analysis, and a comprehensive literature review. Triangulation, first formalized by Campbell and Fiske (1959) in their seminal work on convergent and discriminant validation, involves the use of multiple methodological approaches to examine a single phenomenon (Denzin and Lincoln, 2008).

Following this principle, the study combines theoretical analysis with empirical investigation, focusing on representative palace intrigue dramas to explore the male gaze in Chinese media and its implications for gender representation and power dynamics. Structurally, the article first traces the genealogy of the male gaze to establish its theoretical framework. It then reviews the evolution of female-centered harem dramas in China, foregrounding the portrayal of the “diva protagonist” as a pivotal element in these narratives (Zhu, 2013). Drawing on qualitative content analysis, the study illustrates how such dramas, despite their putative focus on female experiences, remain firmly circumscribed by male-oriented modes of viewing. Semi-structured interviews further elucidate the manifestations and consequences of the male gaze among male viewers (Appendix A). By employing triangulation, this study examines a single phenomenon through multiple methodological lenses, integrating their complementary strengths to reduce method specific bias and enhance the overall credibility of the analysis.

Based on the findings, this study posits that the male gaze contributes to the incomplete formation of male identities, thereby perpetuating societal norms that oppress women. This research critically examines the operation of the male gaze in China, revealing the feminist practices of Chinese males, the dialectics of gazing and being gazed upon, the complexities of female identity in current social relations, and the sexual circle as a marker of group distinction. Finally, the research offers practical implications for the production of future film and television dramas, urging content creators to critically evaluate the gendered frameworks shaping popular narratives.

The theoretical genealogy of the male gaze constitutes both a visual lineage within the history of philosophy and a mechanism through which power consciousness is continuously reproduced. Since ancient Greek philosophy positioned the act of gazing as the origin of truth and order, vision has been structurally linked to knowledge, judgment, and domination. As the theory developed over the course of the twentieth century, gaze gradually came to be understood not as a unidirectional act but as a relational structure, thereby establishing the dialectical tension between “seeing” and “being seen” (Kuechenhoff, 2007, pp. 445–462). Within this framework, the act of gazing and being gazed upon constructs the “subject” and the “object,” also referred to as the self and the other. However, within the interplay of multiple perspectives, the subject of power and desire faces the potential for transformation.

Since Sartre’s Being and Nothingness identified being looked at by the Other as a decisive moment in the formation of subjectivity, gaze has been explicitly conceptualized as a mechanism through which power emerges. The subject does not precede relations but is compelled to recognize itself as an exposed object at the very moment it is seen, completing self-objectification through the affective experience of shame (Webber, 2020). This formulation implies that gaze has the capacity to reorganize social relations that structure subject positions. However, within Sartre’s framework, gaze remains primarily understood as a sudden relational event, in which the encounter between subject and Other is presented as an instantaneous form of oppression. How visual relations continue to operate in everyday experience and how they become stabilized as repeatable structures remain insufficiently theorized.

It is precisely within this unexplored dimension that Merleau–Ponty advances the ontological foundation of gaze theory through the notion of mutual constitution within visibility. Ponty argues that the visual relation between subject and other is not formed through unilateral possession or confrontation but emerges through the interweaving of bodily sensibility and visibility within the world (Edgar, 2005). This perspective fundamentally clarifies that gaze is not an externally imposed form of power but a perceptual structure co generated by the subject and the world. Yet at another level, this move obscures the problem of power asymmetry. If subject and Other are mutually constituted in co presence, why does structural domination persist in visual relations, and why are certain subjects consistently positioned as objects of observation and regulation, while others are naturalized as centers of vision? This question remains unresolved within the phenomenological framework. In other words, while Merleau–Ponty clarifies the generative logic of gaze, he does not fully account for how gaze becomes institutionalized or how it is continually reproduced within social structures.

Against this backdrop, Lacan (2003) introduces the concept of the gaze as structurally anterior to the subject, through which gaze is repositioned from an intersubjective relation to a functional component of the symbolic order. Within this theoretical framework, gaze is revealed as a concealed form of social power that compels individuals to enter a specific symbolic order. The male gaze thus positions women as visible objects of possession, while male subjects, through the act of looking, continually stabilize and reaffirm their own identity (Goddard, 2000).

Mulvey’s (2006) (Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema) translates this abstract structure into the concrete domain of cinematic experience, providing the first systematic definition of the male gaze in film studies. She conceptualizes gaze as a viewing regime jointly produced by unconscious structures, cinematic form, and narrative mechanisms. Drawing on Freud’s theory of scopophilia and Lacan’s mirror stage, Mulvey (1975, 2022) further argues that the male subject operates through two interlocking mechanisms in screen narratives, namely voyeuristic scopophilia and narcissistic identification. The former involves viewing the other as a controlled visual object, while the latter allows spectators to achieve an illusion of self-wholeness through identification with the male protagonist. Together, these mechanisms reveal how cinema formally produces an underlying division of visual power, in which women exist primarily as images, while men more often occupy the position of the gazing subject. Irigaray (1993) subsequently extends this critique by arguing that gaze not only structures visual relations but also organizes epistemic and discursive orders, excluding women from the position of rational subjectivity through the very act of being seen.

In the Chinese context, this visual regime has been continuously reproduced in culturally specific forms. Dai (1999, p. 188) extends this theoretical lineage through a reflection on the condition of being “still in the mirror.” Over time, women in Chinese visual culture have often internalized the external gaze through practices of self-gazing, transforming visibility into a substitute for agency. Within a patriarchal visual system, women’s visibility is thus frequently misrecognized as empowerment, a misrecognition that obscures the ongoing reproduction of visual power (Zhou, 2024, pp. 54–57). From this perspective, the male gaze is less a mode of looking than a social psychological mechanism that sustains gender hierarchy through visual order and aestheticized asymmetry. To establish a position for female libido, it becomes essential to construct narratives dominated by female thought and lived experience.

Yet after feminist theory exposed the structural violence of the male gaze and destabilized the legitimacy of heterosexual male subjectivity as the viewing center, gaze theory encountered a new problem of power demarcation. The question emerged as to whether this mechanism could operate only through a heterosexual male subject. It is precisely in response to this theoretical tension that the introduction of homosexual desire generated an internal differentiation within gaze theory, transforming gay gaze into a central analytical concern.

Although the term gay gaze was systematically articulated in the 1990s, the viewing structure it describes had already been extensively discussed in earlier studies of homosexual culture in the 1970s (Drukman, 1995a; Babuscio, 1977). In his seminal study of gay sensibility, Babuscio (1977) proposed a visual posture distinct from heterosexual male viewing logic, arguing that gay audiences often enter mainstream visual texts through excessive identification, aesthetic exaggeration, and parodic immersion. While the term gaze is not explicitly employed in this account, the description nonetheless delineates the foundational characteristics of such a viewing practice. This mode of viewing is described not as one oriented toward possession or control, but as a strategy of stylized entry and affective overinvestment, through which a position conventionally defined as being looked at is transformed into an aesthetic position that can be actively occupied. On a theoretical level, this formulation establishes a key feature of the gay gaze. Rather than functioning as a simple variation of the male gaze, the gay gaze emerges as a differentiated viewing mode operating within dominant gaze structures and mediated through aesthetic sensibility and affect.

The concept was later systematized in A Queer Romance (Drukman, 1995b), where gay gaze is defined as an aesthetic posture that deviates from normative regimes of looking. The analysis demonstrates that even within heteronormative visual systems, a recognizable mode of viewing persists, one regulated by homosexual desire and cultural sensibility. At the same time, this formulation implicitly reconfigures the viewing subject as a cultural position that can be strategically occupied. Within this framework, entry into the pleasure economy of mainstream texts becomes possible while maintaining meta-awareness and a stylized distance from its governing logic.

This theoretical positioning also provides an empirically testable direction for subsequent research. Early empirical studies of gay gaze indicate that gay men, due to their marginal position within patriarchal structures, often exhibit strong resonance with feminist critiques of gaze and consequently develop viewing orientations distinct from those of heterosexual men (Wood, 2014). This finding underscores that viewing positions are shaped by subjects’ locations within power structures. In gay viewing practices, subject positions demonstrate more pronounced oscillation and interchange. On the one hand, spectators may enter positions traditionally coded as feminine through transvestic identification (Zhang, 2018), while on the other hand they return to trajectories of ego identification through self-admiration (Thornham, 2015). This back-and-forth movement between objectification and self-confirmation constitutes a critical reprogramming of the regulatory logic governing who can look and how looking is authorized.

At the level of concrete practice, gay gaze often redistributes viewing positions through diva identification and theatricalization. Excessive affective investment in powerful female figures and their aesthetic sanctification allows viewers to symbolically inhabit the position of the woman as spectacle while retaining meta-awareness of visual power. This produces a dual posture of immersion and detachment. In an analysis of McNally’s play The Lisbon Traviata, Drukman (1995a) demonstrates how this mechanism is repeatedly inscribed in modern popular culture and performance arts. The veneration of opera divas and pop icons, together with a stylistic preference for the exaggerated, theatrical, and extravagant, forms a collective code of viewing and group recognition (Bronski, 1984; Jennex, 2013). Consequently, the gay gaze does not constitute a singular de patriarchal vision. Under certain conditions, it may loosen the stability of heteronormative narratives, yet it may also be absorbed into an aesthetic economy where visibility functions as cultural capital (Wood, 2014).

Through this theoretical progression, it becomes evident that male gaze, feminist critique, and gay gaze do not form a linear sequence of replacement but rather constitute a continuously inward turning viewing structure. Gaze is no longer solely a matter of how power is exposed but of how power is softly maintained through differentiated modes of looking, which corresponds to an increasingly normalized viewing condition. It is in response to this theoretical blind spot that this study introduces the concept of unperturbed gaze. In visual science and neuroscience, unperturbed gaze refers to a baseline state of looking that is free from external disturbance, functioning as a reference condition against which perturbed gaze is defined in order to describe how perceptual systems operate under stable conditions (Binaee et al., 2022; Sağlam et al., 2011). This study translates this technical meaning into a socio-cultural analysis of viewing, using it to identify a stable gaze position sustained by narrative structure, aesthetic mechanisms, and affective regulation.

Within this state, spectators’ viewing is smoothly guided, while ethical reflection is deferred or neutralized, allowing gaze to continue operating without interruption. In other words, the concern of this study is not whether gaze is violent but how gaze acquires immunity through more concealed mechanisms, enabling it to continuously generate pleasure while lowering the cost of reflexive disturbance. Because socio cultural gaze theory has lacked systematic empirical and conceptual engagement with such stable viewing states, the introduction of unperturbed gaze shifts the analytical focus from exposing conflict and resistance toward examining the mechanisms of viewing stability and perceptual immunity.

As a distinctive genre of historical television drama, harem dramas construct their narrative space within the “inner court” of Chinese imperial dynasties, using struggles over power, desire, and status among women as the primary narrative engine (Wang, 2020). Since 2010, the Chinese television industry has shown growing interest in series that foreground “strong women,” in explicit contrast to the once-dominant “dumb, naïve, and sweet” (傻白甜) stereotype (Miao and Tian, 2022). These female figures are most frequently situated in Qing court settings, within which harem dramas have become a major cultural form. Their production logic reflects both the commercial strategies of capital and the projection of collective social psychology. In this sense, harem dramas operate at two levels: they re-commodify female-centered narratives for the entertainment market, and they provide a historical screen onto which contemporary hierarchies and moral orders are projected and reimagined.

The Legend of Zhen Huan, released in 2012, is one of China’s most famous female-oriented harem dramas, depicting the brutal politics among the empresses and concubines of Emperor Yongzheng during the Qing Dynasty. It narrates the story of Zhen Huan, an intelligent yet naive girl who learns to survive in the inner court through various trials, transforming from a victim of imperial and patriarchal power into a rebel who symbolically overthrows the emperor and eventually becomes the empress dowager, experiencing love, tragedy, and sisterhood along the way. This 76-episode drama has been widely praised for its high production quality and realism, continually attracting new audiences and repeat viewers even today (Yang, 2021).

The Story of Yanxi Palace is another popular harem drama that tells the complex story of the female protagonist Wei Yingluo, involving revenge, struggle, love, sisterhood, hatred, and performance in Emperor Qianlong’s harem during the Qing Dynasty. Unlike Zhen, who comes from a respectable family and initially strives to remain kind, Wei is more aggressive, resourceful, cunning, and manipulative, ultimately rising from a low-class maid to become the third Empress (Tuan, 2020).

Over the past decade, harem dramas have developed a narrative structure centered on a diva protagonist. However, despite portraying a diva, the male gaze remains present, establishing a narrative order that caters to male desires. Compared to early 21st-century harem dramas like The Golden Bough (2004) and The Harem of the Qing Dynasty (2006), which are set during the eve of the Qing Empire’s disintegration and conclude with female characters fleeing the harem as the revolutionary army overthrows the empire, LZH and SYP are set in the powerful mid-Qing period and depict female protagonists ultimately rising to power within the harem. Recent Chinese harem dramas focus on the intersection of gender power and bodily experiences, particularly in relation to reproduction, childbirth, miscarriages, infertility, and social status (Yang, 2021). Harem dramas create a “spectacular” world dominated by women, contrasting with the male-dominated court and public spheres. Scenes set in the private harem often emphasize female appearance and physicality, reinforcing a voyeuristic perspective that drives the male gaze.

Furthermore, the male gaze is evident in the plots and characterization of harem dramas. Due to the specific gender ideologies of ancient China, it is problematic to directly map this gender order onto historical reality, resulting in a patriarchal tone in both plot and character depiction. Emperors in Chinese history practiced polygamy; however, they had one principal wife (queen), often chosen for political rather than personal reasons, who ranked above all concubines to ensure male descendants upheld the patriarchal lineage. Concubines were expected to be loyal to the emperor, soft-spoken, attentive to domestic duties, and refrain from involvement in public and political affairs (Ropp, 2015). Concubines had to gain the emperor’s favor to share his “dews” (sperm) and conceive. Women in the palace were subject to strict hierarchies, with ranks and salaries akin to the civil bureaucracy, leading to fragmentation and power struggles within the palace (Ropp, 2015). The ultimate goal for any concubine was to produce male heirs, as “a mother gains honor and prestige through her son” (母凭子贵). These patriarchal elements and gender hierarchies are central themes in contemporary harem dramas.

It is evident from the specific plots and character roles that female characters in harem dramas remain confined within the male gaze. As the narrative unfolds, female concubines are introduced in each episode, all possessing good looks, charming manners, and wearing exquisite, luxurious clothing. The plot and characters establish a seductive framework that caters to male erotic desires, thereby sustaining a stable male gaze throughout the drama. Harem dramas also provide sexual stimulation to enhance gaze pleasure, often depicting concubines sharing intimate moments with the emperor. For instance, in LZH, the concubine An Lingrong is depicted being wrapped in a quilt and carried naked to the emperor’s bed. Additionally, numerous scenes featuring female nudity are present in these dramas.

The texts and existing studies on harem dramas demonstrate that the male gaze in contemporary palace narratives has evolved into a more concealed mechanism of cultural power. Rather than functioning through overt gender oppression, it operates within the aesthetic order and affective logic of visual culture, reinterpreting and re-mediating female experience. This mechanism transforms the female body into a symbol of both political and erotic significance, ensuring that the formation of maternal power remains dependent on the reproduction of patriarchal structures (Ropp, 2015). At the same time, narrative empathy is institutionalized as a consumable affective politics, through which audiences, while ostensibly “understanding women,” in fact sustain the cultural structures of gender inequality. Aesthetic immersion, enhanced through elaborate costume design and cinematographic techniques, further neutralizes the tension of power conflicts, converting court politics into an order of visual pleasure (Yang, 2021).

Consequently, the violence of the gaze is no longer explicit but instead diluted through emotion and aesthetics, rendering its power even more enduring. Harem dramas thus constitute an internalized mechanism of viewing: while ostensibly centered on female protagonists, they continue to reinforce the control of women’s visibility under male desire. This viewing logic exposes a core paradox within contemporary Chinese visual culture. The visibility of women signifies their renewed subjection to the gaze, and the redistribution of power completes its cycle within the economy of visual pleasure. Through in-depth interviews and textual analysis, this study further explores the dialectical structure of “gazing” and “being gazed upon” in harem dramas, revealing how visual politics reconstructs the cultural position of the male subject within mediated narratives.

This study employed an interpretive qualitative research approach to further examine the mechanisms of the gaze among male audiences when watching harem dramas, as well as the underlying logic of gendered power reflected through these mechanisms. In-depth interviews served as the primary data collection method, designed to explore the culturally constructed relationship between “seeing” and “being seen,” with particular emphasis on the projection of desire and the negotiation of identity by male subjects in the process of visual consumption. The research aims to reveal how the gaze operates within male viewing practices in contemporary China and how the experience of “being gazed upon” constitutes a latent emotional drive underlying social subjectivity.

Participants were recruited through the researcher’s personal social networks and online fan communities, primarily via Weibo and Douban. These two platforms were selected because they represent the main arenas for audience interaction and the formation of public opinion in China’s television culture, providing a highly representative sample base. The researcher posted recruitment announcements and sent private invitations across both platforms, sending more than 100 invitations in total, with recruitment posts receiving over 4,000 views. Using a combination of open recruitment and snowball sampling, the study ultimately recruited 41 participants for in-depth interviews.

Sampling followed the principle of theoretical sampling to ensure that participants possessed adequate viewing experience. Only male viewers who had watched at least three harem dramas or viewed a single drama in its entirety more than three times were included. The participants ranged in age from 19 to 42 and came from diverse professional backgrounds, including students, civil servants, designers, and media practitioners. Their geographical distribution covered both eastern coastal and central-western regions of China, ensuring contextual and cultural diversity.

Notably, among the 41 interviewees, 25 self-identified as homosexual, while one participant indicated that sexual orientation had not yet been clearly articulated. This composition introduces an additional analytical dimension for examining the relationship between gay gaze and gender identity. Within the context of in-depth qualitative interviewing, the sample size proves sufficient to support a generalization of male viewing mechanisms while simultaneously enabling a stable comparative analysis of differentiated viewing experiences between homosexual and heterosexual audiences under conditions of theoretical saturation. Within this configuration, the respective numbers of homosexual and heterosexual participants allow each group to be observed as an internally coherent collective, thereby providing a reliable empirical basis for examining the relationship between gaze typologies and gender identification.

All interviews were conducted by the same researcher to ensure contextual consistency and foster a sense of trust between interviewer and participants. The interviews were carried out online via Tencent Meeting, each lasting approximately 90 to 120 min. Audio recordings were transcribed and coded using NVivo 12 to preserve key analytical content. A semi-structured interview outline was employed, balancing theoretical guidance with narrative openness (Table 1). The core interview questions included: (1) the participants’ motivations and emotional experiences when watching harem dramas; (2) their perceptions of female and male characters; (3) their self-awareness of gaze position and sense of gender identity during viewing; and (4) the potential influence of harem dramas on their daily lives, gender imaginaries, or self-perception. During the interviews, participants were encouraged to engage in free association, and the researcher used follow-up questions to further explore the emotional and aesthetic mechanisms underlying their judgments.

To ensure ethical compliance and data reliability, all participants signed an Informed Consent Form prior to the interviews and were explicitly informed that the recordings would be used solely for academic research purposes. During transcription and analysis, all data were anonymized, with identifying information replaced by numerical codes to protect participants’ privacy and safety. The study was conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the Human Research Ethics Committee for Science and Technology from the institution. Through systematic sampling design and rigorous ethical safeguards, this research seeks to reveal the cultural and psychological mechanisms underlying the formation of the male gaze in contemporary Chinese harem dramas. Combined with the preceding theoretical analysis, this process realizes a triangulation approach that ensures both the theoretical depth and empirical validity of the findings.

This study adopts unperturbed gaze as an overarching theoretical framework and, by integrating textual analysis with findings from in-depth interviews, elucidates the multi-layered psychological mechanisms and visual political structures that characterize male viewing practices in contemporary Chinese palace intrigue dramas. The analysis indicates that voyeuristic desire, identity negotiation, and homosocially inflected modes of looking together constitute a logic of viewing marked by de-conflictualization and the suspension of responsibility. Through the aestheticization of pleasure and the maintenance of ethical distance, gendered power relations are softened into consumable cultural experiences, thereby enabling a reorganization rather than a disruption of patriarchal order.

Within the Chinese context, voyeuristic desire is reconfigured as a form of positional allocation within the symbolic order rather than as a purely visual impulse. Identity negotiation does not amount to a substantive shift toward empathic transformation but instead stabilizes preexisting subject-object distinctions through a mirrored cycle of proxy identification. Gay gaze, while appearing to depart from heterosexual norms, frequently reaffirms discursive boundaries and group authority through cultural symbols such as diva worship. The operative logic that emerges can thus be summarized through three interlocking mechanisms: the aestheticization of desire, the gamification of difference, and the depoliticization of power. The outcome is the reproduction of an “unfinished male subject” sustained at a safe distance, a subject that confirms itself through looking, secures itself through boundary drawing, and neutralizes critical force through the selective appropriation of feminist vocabulary. Rather than weakening the male gaze, this configuration represents a postmodern reorganization that binds the advancement of desire to the deferral of ethical engagement, allowing looking to function as a form of soft governance over gender order, one that preserves objectification while evading self-transformation.

A multi-method approach is employed to examine the same phenomenon from complementary angles, thereby mitigating the limitations and biases inherent in any single method and enhancing both interpretive depth and analytical credibility. On the basis of these findings, the analysis suggests that visual discipline at the level of textual form, audience discursive practices, and platform-based logics of circulation mutually reinforce one another within this viewing apparatus. Female-centered narratives at the level of content, rather than destabilizing this configuration, are readily absorbed as consumable spectacles of “strong women.” Correspondingly, audience-level performances of feminist stance frequently slide into shallow appropriation through ethically unperturbed modes of engagement.

In this sense, the findings contribute a practice-centered theoretical perspective to the study of gendered looking in Chinese female-oriented cultural production, supplementing existing approaches that have largely focused on narrative subjectivity or representational politics. Prior scholarship on female-oriented texts has often taken women’s visibility and the politics of desire as its point of entry. Song (2020), for example, interprets SYP as a cultural mechanism of reconciliation centered on female subjectivity. Within that framework, female characters attain narrative and visual visibility through heightened moral self-discipline, sustained emotional labor, and the symbolic repair of historical order. Such visibility, rationalized through affect and moral elevation, enables a stable coexistence between national imagination and gender politics. By contrast, the present analysis shifts attention to male viewing practices as the site through which affective adjustment and subjective stabilization are accomplished in female-oriented texts. Strong female visibility, rather than necessarily triggering ethical transformation in viewing structures, is more likely to be reworked into a low-friction mechanism of affective regulation, allowing male subjects to maintain boundaries while achieving self-stability. In this process, female-oriented narratives are converted into technologies of governance at a safe distance, enabling confirmation through looking, coherence through boundary maintenance, and immunity through feminist appropriation, all without incurring the costs of self-reconfiguration.

A parallel argument can be found in Xi (2025), where female gaze and voyeuristic desire are conceptualized as forms of empowered gazing. Female readers derive voyeuristic pleasure from the aestheticized contemplation of male bodies and intimate relations, projecting a more autonomous subjectivity and a neoliberal sensibility through imaginaries of idealized masculinity. Such creative practices, however, remain constrained by the dual pressures of market forces and state regulation, resulting in a dilution of political orientation that resists reduction to a simple subversion of patriarchy.

The present findings extend this discussion from another angle. Within Chinese female-oriented visual texts, male audiences do not occupy a merely excluded or passive position but instead develop a viewing strategy characterized by ethical neutralization. Here, unperturbed voyeurism is no longer driven by gender reversal but is reorganized through distancing and symbolic mediation in order to alleviate identity threat and preserve subjective coherence. The form of voyeuristic desire identified thus functions as a male adaptive mechanism generated within female-oriented cultural production, revealing how the politics of looking are redistributed across gendered subjects through platform-based modes of circulation.

On this basis, a central claim emerges: the expansion of female subject visibility does not necessarily entail a rewriting of power relations but more often manifests as a variant of the viewing economy. Within this configuration, unperturbed gaze becomes increasingly legible as a low-risk technology of affective regulation, transforming voyeuristic desire into a mode of safe entry into female-oriented narratives while maintaining structural continuity in gender order through depoliticized consumption.

This study nonetheless has certain limitations. The empirical material is drawn primarily from platform-based communities, and the sample size does not fully capture variations in male viewing psychology across different media environments and social strata. Future research may extend this line of inquiry through experimental designs incorporating psychometric measures and physiological indicators, testing the reparative emotional effects of aesthetic distance or the dynamics of identity threat. Further investigation may also explore narrative and algorithmic interventions capable of activating ethical engagement, including multi-subjective perspectives, the foregrounding of ethical conflict, and decentered recommendation mechanisms. More broadly, the analysis demonstrates how the paradoxical relation between understanding and gazing is depoliticized and translated into affective synchronization within platformized communication. In doing so, it offers a testable middle-range theoretical framework for examining emotional regulation, boundary maintenance, and group attunement in viewing psychology, while also suggesting avenues for creative practice through which ethical friction and intersubjective resonance might be reintroduced via multi-voiced narration, conflict articulation, and de-synchronizing design strategies.