Laura Mulvey

A beginners’ guide to...Laura Mulvey-http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/subscribers/downloads/archive_mm/_mmagpast/mm21_theory_mulvey.html


• According to the theory, which really assesses the representation of gender and the relationship between the text and the audience from a solely feminist perspective, women in film are simply objects for ‘the gaze’ of the protagonist/male audience.


Feminist film theory studies the way films make meaning for their audiences from the perspective of feminist politics.

FREUD AND SCOPOPHILIA

scopophilia is the pleasure of watching.

Scopophilia then, refers to the mature adult’s desire to see things that are culturally forbidden or taboo.


DEVELOPMENTS OF THE GAZE

Throughout the decades following Mulvey’s essay, the concept of the gaze was developed to incorporate a number of different viewer-positions. For example:

• The spectator’s gaze: the audience looking at the subject on the screen.

• The male gaze: in keeping with Mulvey’s theory describes the male viewing the female, either voyeuristically or fetishistically.

• The female gaze: accepts that women can also gain voyeuristic pleasure from looking at a subject, and that film techniques can sometimes be used to position the female audience to do so.

• The intra-diegetic gaze: when one character in the text looks/gazes at another character in the text. Through the process of identification, this may lead to the spectator’s gaze also.

• The extra-diegetic gaze: when a character in the text looks out of the text at the audience, breaking the imaginary ‘fourth wall’.

The gaze is inextricably linked to power relationships – the bearer of the gaze has the power. In most cases, the subject of the gaze doesn’t even know they are being looked at (we assume); thus the bearer of the gaze has more knowledge than the subject, and therefore, more power. In Mulvey’s original essay, it is the male who holds this power, and the male film-maker who gives it to him. In developments of the theory, the bearer of the gaze may be female, and the subject may challenge the bearer’s power by gazing right back.