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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]
Regarding Mulvey's view of the identity of the gaze, some authors questioned "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" on the matter of whether the gaze is really always male. Mulvey does not acknowledge a protagonist and a spectator other than a heterosexual male, failing to consider a woman or homosexual as the gaze. [13]
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.
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
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.
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Mulvey discussed aspects of voyeurism and fetishism in the male gaze in her article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema".She drew from Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film, Rear Window, applying terms from Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis to discuss camera angle, narrative choice, and props in the movie while focusing on the concept of the male gaze.
In the early 1970s, Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey separately explored aspects of the "gaze" in the cinema, Metz stressing the viewer's identification with the camera's vision, [8] - an identification largely "constructed" by the film itself [9] - and Mulvey the fetishistic aspects of (especially) the male viewer's regard for the onscreen female body.