This paper explores how the ecological gaze disciplines environmental behavior through the intertwined mechanisms of discourse, emotion, and symbolism, with attention to spatial and embodied dimensions. Drawing on Foucault's theory of disciplinary power, we argue that pro-environmental actions are not solely the result of rational incentives or regulatory enforcement, but are deeply shaped by systems of moral visibility and affective governance. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and 22 interviews on Qingbang Island, China, the study identifies three primary disciplinary pathways. First, discursive discipline operates through environmental campaigns, tourist expectations, and volunteer messaging that frame responsibility in normative terms. Second, affective discipline emerges through emotions such as shame, guilt, and pride, as individuals anticipate or internalize the gaze of others. Third, symbolic and visual discipline is enacted through signs, uniforms, sacred sites, and polluted seascapes that embody moral cues and social meaning. These disciplinary forces are further reinforced through spatial visibility, where behavior is regulated in highly visible zones, and embodied routines, such as waste sorting and cleanup labor, which physically encode moral expectations. Together, these mechanisms reveal how environmental governance functions not only through policy or persuasion, but through a network of gazes that structure conduct at the level of identity, space, and habit. By theorizing the ecological gaze as a disciplinary apparatus, this study contributes a multi-dimensional framework for understanding how environmental responsibility is seen, felt, performed, and internalized.
Zhuo et al. (Fri,) studied this question.