Laura Mulvey and her work.

• Female British Feminist film theorist.
• 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.
• Psychoanalytic framework, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Prior to Mulvey.
• Believed classical Hollywood cinema was what began women being publicised as sex objects and only for male desire.
• In 50’s and 60’s Mulvey said there were only 2 distinct models of the male gaze, "voyeuristic" (i.e. seeing women as 'whores') and "fetishistic" (i.e. seeing women as 'madonnas').
• Visual pleasure and narrative cinema.
• Gaze and feminist theory Laura Mulvey coined the term ‘Male Gaze’ in 1975. She believes that in film audiences have to ‘view’ characters from the perspective of a heterosexual male.
• In feminist theory, the male gaze expresses an asymmetric (unequal) power relationship, between viewer and viewed, gazer and gazed, i.e. man imposes his unwanted (objectifying) gaze upon woman.
• Professor of film and media studies.
• Feminist critic Gaylyn Studlar wrote extensively to contradict Mulvey's central thesis that the spectator is male and derives visual pleasure from a dominant, sadistic perspective.
• "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was the subject of much interdisciplinary discussion among film theorists that continued into the mid 1980s.
• Critics of the article objected to the fact that her argument implied the impossibility of genuine 'feminine' enjoyment of the classical Hollywood cinema, and to the fact that her argument did not seem to take into account spectatorships that were not organised along the normative lines of gender. For example, a metaphoric 'transvestism' might be possible when viewing a film – a male viewer might enjoy a 'feminine' point-of-view provided by a film, or vice versa; gay, lesbian and bisexual spectatorships might also be different.

Lauren Gibbens