Laura Mulvey Male Gaze Theory

By: Hamim Tak AS-F

Laura Mulvey (born 15 August 1941) is a British

feminist film theorist. She was educated at St

Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of

film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of

London. She worked at the British Film Institute for

many years before taking up her current position.

During the 2008-09 academic year, Mulvey was the

Mary Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor in the

Humanities at Wellesley College.[1] Professor

Mulvey has been awarded three honorary degrees:

in 2006 a Doctor of Letters from the University of

East Anglia; in 2009 a Doctor of Law from Concordia

University; in 2012 a Bloomsday Doctor of

Literature from University College Dublin.

The Back-story:

The development of feminist film theory was

influenced by second wave feminism and the

development of women's studies. Feminist scholars

began taking cues from the new theories arising

from these movements to analyzing film. Initial

attempts in the United States in the early 1970s

were generally based on sociological theory and

focused on the function of women characters in

particular film narratives or genres and of

stereotypes as a reflection of a society's view of

women. Works such as Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn

Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream

(1973) and Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape:

The Treatment of Women in Movies (1974) analyze

how the women portrayed in film related to the

broader historical context, the stereotypes

depicted, the extent to which the women were

shown as active or passive, and the amount of

screen time given to women.

In contrast, film theoreticians in England began

integrating critical theory based perspectives drawn

from psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Marxism, and

eventually these ideas gained hold within the

American scholarly community in the later 1970s

and 1980s. Analysis generally focused on "the

production of meaning in a film text, the way a text

constructs a viewing subject, and the ways in which

the very mechanisms of cinematic production affect

the representation of women and reinforce

sexism".

Mulvey’s Theory:

Mulvey is best known for her essay, Visual Pleasure

and Narrative Cinema, written in 1973 and

published in 1975 in the influential British film

theory journal Screen. It later appeared in a

collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other

Pleasures, as well as in numerous other anthologies.

Her article, which was influenced by the theories of

Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, is one of the first

major essays that helped shift the orientation of

film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework.

Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis

Baudry and Christian Metz used psychoanalytic

ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema.

Mulvey's contribution, however, inaugurated the

intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis and

feminism.

Mulvey states that she intends to use Freud and

Lacan's concepts as a "political weapon." She then

used some of their concepts to argue that the

cinematic apparatus of classical Hollywood cinema

inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject

position, with the figure of the woman on screen as

the object of desire and "the male gaze." In the era

of classical Hollywood cinema, viewers were

encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the

film, who were and still are overwhelmingly male.

Meanwhile, Hollywood women characters of the

1950s and '60s were, according to Mulvey, coded

with "to-be-looked-at-ness" while the camera

positioning and the male viewer constituted the

"bearer of the look." Mulvey suggests two distinct

modes of the male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic"

(i.e. seeing woman as image "to be looked at") and

"fetishistic" (i.e. seeing woman as a substitute for

"the lack," the underlying psychoanalytic fear of

castration).

Mulvey & Hollywood:

Mulvey was prominent as an avant-garde filmmaker

in the 1970s and 1980s. With Peter Wollen, her

husband, she co-wrote and co-directed Penthesilea:

Queen of the Amazons (1974), Riddles of the Sphinx

(1977 - perhaps their most influential film), AMY!

(1980), Crystal Gazing (1982), Frida Kahlo and Tina

Modotti (1982), and The Bad Sister. In 1991, she

returned to filmmaking with Disgraced Monuments,

which she co-directed with Mark Lewis.

Examples of Mulvey’s belief:

Resources:

1. Google.com.pk

2. Wikipedia.org

Thank you