Laura Mulvey - Visual Pleasure and the Male Gaze

Visual Pleasure and the Male Gaze

Intro to Mulvey:

- She is a feminist film scholar 
- Wrote 'visual pleasure and narrative cinema' (1975)
- Analysed Hollywood cinema and argued that female characters were represented as passive objects of male sexual desire.
- This is encapsulated in the term 'the Male Gaze'
- A film is watched through the eyes of the male characters

- Scopophilia is the pleasure one can gain from looking
- Cinema offers these pleasures voyeuristically
- Thereby satisfying the male scopophilic desires
- A women connotes something to be looked at
- Simply, men look and women are looked at
- Subject and object

- Her theory specifically related to classical Hollywood cinema
- She wanted more feminist avant-garde filmmaking to battle the patriarchal Hollywood system
- Her theory can still be seen in many other forms of cinema through

The Look:
3 different ways of looking in cinema:

- The look of the camera that records the film (Phallic Camera)
- The look of the audience that views the film
- The look of the characters (male, dominant, subjects) within the film

Criticisms:

- The theory focuses on heterosexual male spectators
- It assumes audiences respond to the text in a uniform way
- Ignores the possibility of males providing visual pleasure
- Kathleen Rowe argues that being the object of the gaze is a position of power
- Richard Dyer questions the association of looking as active ad being looked at as passive

The Gaze in Action

What the male characters looking at?
What is the camera looking at?
What is the audiences expected to be looking at?
What are the purposes of the shots of the male and female characters?
What is the presumed spectator?
Which characters are dominant and which are submissive?

Ill Manors

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