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In her writing on feminist film theory, Mulvey has argued that, if the dominant cinema produces pleasure through scopophilia which favours the male gaze and festishization of woman as object, then alternative versions of cinema need to construct different forms of pleasure based on psychic relations that adopt a feminist perspective. [4]
Mulvey states that she intends to use Freud and Lacan's concepts as a "political weapon". She employs 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 ...
Mulvey also asserts that the dominance men embody is only so because women exist, as without a woman for comparison, a man and his supremacy as the controller of visual pleasure are insignificant. For Mulvey, it is the presence of the female that defines the patriarchal order of society as well as the male psychology of thought.
In Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", [12] [16] [17] she presents, explains, and develops the cinematic concept of the male gaze. Mulvey proposes that sexual inequality — the asymmetry of social and political power between men and women — is a controlling social force in the cinematic representations of
Male gaze theory, popularized by Laura Mulvey, is a concept many feminist film critics have pointed to in classical Hollywood film-making. Laura Mulvey's theory on the Male Gaze describes how viewers respond to visual content. The term "male gaze" describes a sexualized form of seeing that allows men to objectify women.
[21] [22] Yet voyeurism and the male gaze are psychological practices basic to the spectators' emotional experience of viewing mainstream, commercial cinema; [23] notably, the male gaze is fully presented, described, and explained, and contrasted with the female gaze, in the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), by Laura Mulvey. [24]
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[83] Laura Mulvey's influential essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" [84] [85] (written in 1973 and published in 1975) expands on this conception to argue that in cinema women are typically depicted in a passive role that provides visual pleasure through scopophilia, [86] and identification with the on-screen male actor. [86]