Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts opens with a quote from Susan Sontag: “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera” (ix). This frames the book’s focus on the ethics of looking, suggesting that the female gaze can possess the predatory qualities that typically characterize male objectification. However, the novel subtly suggests that it is reductive to claim that Irina is as bad as the men who objectify her because of how she chooses to leverage her gaze against other men. Rather, Irina co-opts the hunter’s mindset that characterizes the patriarchal male gaze in order to underscore its predatory nature. Her commodification of potential models when she goes through Newcastle while “street scouting” reveals a gaze that tries to dissect, direct, and claim its subjects until they become little more than aesthetically pleasing “boy parts.” Clark thus suggests that if it is disturbing for Irina to look at men the way men look at women, then nothing excuses the normalization of the predatory male gaze.

Irina’s search for “beta males” who have feminine physical attributes to model for her exposes a hunter’s mindset that treats the men’s physical bodies as material for her work, rather than as people with dignity. She picks out Daniel on the bus and Eddie at Tesco because their looks match what she wants, and she immediately slots Eddie into a category in her head. As soon as she notices him, she reduces him to traits and compares his beauty to “a new flower no one else has noticed” (34), something she can press flat and keep “all mine.” This need to possess shapes every choice she makes. She rarely thinks of her subjects as people; she treats them as items she collects, and her interest fades once she has captured their images. Her habit of filing men into a “Broad Church of Boys” (239) completes that pattern by turning their individuality into a tidy set of aesthetics that fits her needs.

Irina’s photoshoots pull the aggression in her gaze into the open. When she works with Will, a frequent model, she twists him into “improbable, uncomfortable shapes,” disregards his pain, and brushes aside whatever he says. She uses her strength to control him and wants him to feel “how easy it would be for [her] to keep him knotted up” (32). The camera’s aggression becomes physical domination. In her session with Eddie, she focuses on his thick thighs and soft stomach and pays attention to how “good” he is at doing what she requests. The studio becomes a place where she dictates every move and the men she photographs turn into bodies she can arrange into compromising positions.

Irina’s work aims to preserve her subjects, yet that act depends on stripping away their humanity. Her excitement when she finds a boy who looks “bewildered, and grateful, and will gaze down the barrel of my camera and do anything for me” (34) echoes the satisfaction of someone who corners prey. The fact that she profits from these acts of aggression, whether through her exhibition at Hackney Space or through the patronage of wealthy benefactors like Mr. B and Uncle Stephen Hart, unlocks the socioeconomic angle of Clark’s critique on gender. The wealthy thrive on the suffering of the working class, the same class Irina aspires to escape by benefitting from the pain of others. This ultimately raises parallel ethical questions in the way Irina practices her art: The idea that the depiction of pain is permissible when it is presented as artistic echoes the idea that abuse and exploitation are permissible when privileged people and organizations do it. The patriarchy and the wealthy class are therefore inextricably linked in the context of power and exploitation.