Without Her Knowledge: The Politics Of The Gaze
More than 30,000 pictures and videos were taken by Dominique Pelicot of his wife, middle aged French woman Gisele Pelicot, without her clothes on, without her senses, and without her permission or knowledge. She had never seen his industrial cache of images of her in induced abjection, until the police discovered them inadvertently, and learned that they were shared among unknown numbers of men in a covert network, Without Her Knowledge.
She decided to waive anonymity and wanted some of the filmed scenarios be shown in the exceptional 2024 rape trial in Avignon of 52 men – her former husband and 51 others living in and around her village in southern France. Dominique Pelicot had filmed them after he secretly invited them to enter his wife’s bedroom and rape her whilst she was unconscious.
One of her abusers, Husamettin Dogan, reprised the ghoulish scenario in October 2025 when he appealed against his conviction for rape (to which he had initially pleaded guilty) and nine-year jail sentence. He appeared in court in Nimes to present himself as the victim: he had been manipulated by her husband, he said, who filmed him enter their bedroom, wearing only a condom, where he raped her: No, not rape, he told the court, just ‘sexual acts’.
For a while, he’d said, he thought she was dead. He didn’t explain whether he wondered how she’d died, or how, therefore, she had consented to anything, or why, then, he persisted.
Some of the video footage, showed Dogan penetrating an inert Gisele Pelicot and also trying to force her to ‘perform oral sex’ on him. He claimed to have been there for only half an hour, but the police had produced video footage of him at her home that lasted more than three hours.
The Pelicot trial had been an epochal event in which the main witness, the woman, ‘could say nothing about her experience but the videos spoke for her.’ It told the world something it hardly knew about some men, and their proclivities; their technology of sexual surveillance finally opened the aperture on a hitherto closed community that shared their malign sexual interests, their dedicated voyeurism and their sexist world view.
The trial showed how for a decade these men had been closeted in a masculine culture that preserved men’s secrets, that licensed their privileged gaze and their warrant of entitlement – a kind of material and visual droit de seignior – that is understood thanks to the great feminist insight: the politics of seeing.
Among the remarkable features of the trial was that Gisele Pelicot appeared in person, and announced that shame changed sides, that it belonged to them, not to her. She insisted that the public arena should be allowed to witness their bodies abusing hers.
Then she performed another radical reversal of the rape relationship: during the trial she faced them and stared at them when they gave their evidence. She confronted them with the one thing they had been guaranteed to avoid: her gaze. It was a scarcely-noticed rebellion that disrupted the power of the male gaze that had animated the whole project.
‘Without their Knowledge’ was devised by her husband to deliver the unconscious, unseeing woman in a decade-long, elaborately constructed mis en scene, to recruit male accomplices.
The project realised, in extremis, the gender power axis that film theorist Laura Mulvey described in her 1975 Screen magazine essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in which she argues that ‘the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.’
It structures ‘ways of seeing and pleasure in looking.’ Women are the spectacle, they appear but don‘t define or direct the cinematic narrative, nor do they impinge on what the viewer sees: the gaze, says Mulvey, is constructed through a patriarchal lens.
Mulvey published this hugely influential theory in 1975. In 1972 the art critic John Berger’s revolutionary Ways of Seeing, a book based on a television series made by Mike Dibb, had theorised the politics of seeing and described men as the surveyors of women, and women as doomed to survey themselves: to gain any control over the process, the woman must ‘interiorise’ it in order to ‘constitute her presence’.
Men see, women are seen, ‘men act, women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.’
These insights, formed in the white heat of the Women’s Liberation Movement, help us think about the politics of seeing in the Pelicot crime scene and then in the trial.
In Dominique Pelicot’s meticulous preparations over a decade, his ardent attention to his wife’s everyday comforts camouflaged the drugs he fed her in the evenings that rendered her comatose. She could neither consent nor contribute anything to her metamorphosis from a sentient woman of a certain age to a prostrate, inert, imagined player – an object whose objectification was consummated by the ubiquitous gaze of the abusers and the man behind the camera.
This absolute antithesis of consent – the mission of ‘Without her Consent’ – ensured the men’s absolute sovereignty.
In this drama, however, Gisele Pelicot was not inanimate, she was alive: without her will she was transformed, transported into their fantasy and thus traduced.
Psychologist Elly Hanson has elaborated a weighty challenge to notions of consent: she cautions that in reality ‘much consensual sex is unwanted, harmful or profoundly regretted.’
Gisele Pelicot’s predators were assured that she had consented, that her unconscious participation was part of a game. But it seemed to have escaped them that this was a contradiction in terms: she could not know to what she had consented, and she could not consent to what she could not know.
Hanson insists that the objectification of Gisele Pelicot was not only a ‘violation of her dignity, a kind of mocking – you will be what I want you to be – but also part of a group process: what they were doing together is pivotal.’
The men’s game was enacted in both their rape and the circulation of it, and the collective pleasure in it.
Hanson argues that this critical dynamic, sometimes overlooked, ‘is how offenders are engaged in a collective project of dominance – co-constructing their version of warped masculine power – vicariously enjoying each other’s dominance, performing their own, and losing themselves in the power of the whole.’
This dominance of the gaze, ‘is a part of the violation of their victims’ vulnerability – this sense that they can wholly take in their victim, whilst they themselves are impenetrable (double meaning intended).’
The beating heart of this offending is the body’s massive surge of sadistic, omnipotent energy and contempt. Typically, adds Hanson, these men often ‘move into victim-stancing when faced with their abuse, a form of gaslighting that so often bamboozles and confuses, whether it be to narrate oneself the victim of earlier abuse or of the other offenders.’
This was manifest in the Domminique Pelicot case, in ‘a deep-seated sense of aggrievement on display, the feeling that flows from thwarted entitlement.’
When Gisele Pelicot insisted on facing the perpetrators during the trial, looking at them, staring at them, she exposed them to the last thing they sought: the experience of being seen. Seen this time, that is, not within their own cult of sexual surveillance, but by the public and above all, by their victim, herself.
During the months of that long trial, Gisele Pelicot was witnessed by crowds gathering inside and outside the court, no longer an object, but a speaking subject with a lot to say. So, the politics of the gaze and of sexual objectification were aired unequivocally.
If it was hard to imagine that Gisele Pelicot could recover her privacy thereafter. Nonetheless there would have been a general consensus that she was entitled to it and that her society would support it.
But we were reminded of the mass media’s perverse – and patriarchal – sense of entitlement in April 2025 when Paris Match published uninvited photographs of her out walking with a male friend. She had changed her name and her where she lived. If she had forfeited anonymity during the trial, she now sought to regain her privacy.
The behavior of Paris Match contrasts with the strategy of press photographer, Ray Belisario, Britain’s first and most famous invader of royal privacy who confronted the monarchical mantra ‘be seen, above all be seen’ but only in conditions of sovereign choosing.
The intrepid Belisario was known as the first British paparazzi, but his mission was much more disciplined than that might imply: he was a republican, he was not interested in snooping inside royal closets or under their skirts, he wanted to breach monarchical fortifications that controlled who and what their subjects could see.
His mission was to confront the constitutional historian Walter Bagehot’s proposition that the monarchy’s ‘mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon the magic.’ Mystery secured their sovereignty. That was his political target. Paris Match, by contrast, trespassed on a life that did not parade power, but the opposite, and re-iterated uninvited, unwelcome intrusion that had become the story of her life.
Gisele Pelicot sued and she forced Paris Match to concede and pay compensation to services for women subjected to violence.
She would show that this woman had not survived multiple rapes and 30,000 images taken in the most sordid circumstances without her consent, only to have a mighty, mass circulation magazine publish her image, yet again without her consent.
At the end of Dogan’s appeal case, on 9 Oct the court resolved to increase his prison sentence, and the Prosecutor Dominique Sie confirmed the social heft of the Pelicot revelations: Dogan’s stance was a clear illustration, he said, of persistent rape culture and male domination. Unusually, perhaps uniquely, Without Her Knowledge was understood not as indivudual malevolence but a system that was simultaneously contested and prevalent.
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