Shoegaze and the specific headphone experience of the genre is worth distinguishing from the speaker experience.

In headphones, shoegaze creates an internal landscape. The stereo field is inside your skull rather than in a room, and the immersive quality of the production places you inside the sound rather than in front of it. The bass frequencies are present but not felt; the high frequencies of the feedback are in your ear rather than in the air around you.

The headphone experience of shoegaze is intensely private in a way that the speaker experience isn't. You're inside a world that nobody else can hear. The music becomes more about interiority and less about physical experience.

Both experiences are legitimate and valuable but they're accessing different aspects of what the music is doing. The headphone experience is better for the emotional and introspective content; the speaker experience is better for the physical and architectural content. The ideal listener would have access to both and would know which context to use.