Laura Mulvey's theory on the 'male gaze'


Laura Mulvey is a feminist film theorist. She has written a successful esssay called 'Visual pleasures and narrative cinema'.

She came up with a theory on how the audience are positioned so we see from the male perspective, called the 'MALE GAZE' . This results objectification, where women are seen as objects (sexually objectified). As a result, they are subordinate to men reinforcing patriachy (male dominated society). The spectator (audience) watch the female in a sexual way, in order of gaining erotic pleasure (sexual arousal), voyeuristic pleasure (sexual pleasure of watching someone else) and scopophilia (the pleasure in looking).

This is where Sigmund Freud's theory on psychoanalysis can come in and link in with what Mulvey is talking about. During the male gaze, anxiety can arise due to the idea of castration (remorval of male genital organs) on a women. This then can be filled by a phallic object (connotations of a penis) or a fetish object. This is likey to be seen in movies which follow the concept of the 'whore' and the 'madonna', where the whore dresses in a seductively way allowing the male spectators gettin pleasure by looking at them, though the whore usually dies at the end of the movie. This is where sadism can be introduced (pleasure from someone experiencing pain) as the whore should get punished and when she dies it is like a releif, where the spectaors are satisfied that someone bad gets punished. Narcissism can be seen by the hero as he we would want to be more like him and has the power, this allows the spectator to identify with the character.

Freud is a theorist of psychoanlatic, the founder of psychoanalysis. He had his own theory, where he analysed and was interpreting human behaviour, especially the mind. He came up with the idea of conscious and unconscious using a model of a iceberg. The top half of the iceberg that was visible and over the water was called the conscious and 1/10 of how conscious we were and the bottom called the unconscious and was about 9/10 of how un conscious we are. He said that repression was pushing down or the motion we push into the unconscious and the resistence which he described as to knowing or finding out the truth.

I think that what Mulvey is saying about the male gaze is true to a certain extent becasue its not seen in all text but only a few. Also, her theory is very old now and contemporary society has changed as a result postfeminism was introduced. As a result, her theory is challenged sometimes, especially in recent films that have a female protagonist who is also the hero and not shown in sexual ways, though males can get pleasure from this from the tight suits and the female fighting.