Laura Mulvey's theory.

1. Laura Mulvey
Male Gaze Theory
By: Hamim Tak AS-F

2. Laura Mulvey (born 15 August 1941) is a British
feminist film theorist. She was educated at St
Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of
film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of
London. She worked at the British Film Institute for
many years before taking up her current position.
During the 2008-09 academic year, Mulvey was the
Mary Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor in the
Humanities at Wellesley College.[1] Professor
Mulvey has been awarded three honorary degrees:
in 2006 a Doctor of Letters from the University of
East Anglia; in 2009 a Doctor of Law from Concordia
University; in 2012 a Bloomsday Doctor of
Literature from University College Dublin.
The Back-story:
The development of feminist film theory was
influenced by second wave feminism and the
development of women's studies. Feminist scholars

3. began taking cues from the new theories arising
from these movements to analyzing film. Initial
attempts in the United States in the early 1970s
were generally based on sociological theory and
focused on the function of women characters in
particular film narratives or genres and of
stereotypes as a reflection of a society's view of
women. Works such as Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn
Venus: Women, Movies, and the American Dream
(1973) and Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape:
The Treatment of Women in Movies (1974) analyze
how the women portrayed in film related to the
broader historical context, the stereotypes
depicted, the extent to which the women were
shown as active or passive, and the amount of
screen time given to women.
In contrast, film theoreticians in England began
integrating critical theory based perspectives drawn
from psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Marxism, and
eventually these ideas gained hold within the

4. American scholarly community in the later 1970s
and 1980s. Analysis generally focused on "the
production of meaning in a film text, the way a text
constructs a viewing subject, and the ways in which
the very mechanisms of cinematic production affect
the representation of women and reinforce
sexism".
Mulvey’s Theory:
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. It later appeared in a
collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other
Pleasures, as well as in numerous other anthologies.
Her article, which was influenced by the theories of
Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, is one of the first
major essays that helped shift the orientation of
film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework.
Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis
Baudry and Christian Metz used psychoanalytic

5. ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema.
Mulvey's contribution, however, inaugurated the
intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis and
feminism.
Mulvey states that she intends to use Freud and
Lacan's concepts as a "political weapon." She then
used 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 era
of classical Hollywood cinema, viewers were
encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the
film, who were and still are overwhelmingly male.
Meanwhile, Hollywood women characters of the
1950s and '60s were, according to Mulvey, coded
with "to-be-looked-at-ness" while the camera
positioning and the male viewer constituted the
"bearer of the look." Mulvey suggests two distinct
modes of the male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic"
(i.e. seeing woman as image "to be looked at") and
"fetishistic" (i.e. seeing woman as a substitute for

6. "the lack," the underlying psychoanalytic fear of
castration).
Mulvey & Hollywood:
Mulvey was prominent as an avant-garde filmmaker
in the 1970s and 1980s. With Peter Wollen, her
husband, she co-wrote and co-directed Penthesilea:
Queen of the Amazons (1974), Riddles of the Sphinx
(1977 - perhaps their most influential film), AMY!
(1980), Crystal Gazing (1982), Frida Kahlo and Tina
Modotti (1982), and The Bad Sister. In 1991, she
returned to filmmaking with Disgraced Monuments,
which she co-directed with Mark Lewis.

8. Examples of Mulvey’s belief:

9. Resources:

10. 1. Google.com.pk
2. Wikipedia.org
Thank you 