Mullvey Male Gaze

The male gaze is a concept that refers to how visual culture is designed to please a male viewer by sexually objectifying women. It was first coined by Laura Mulvey, a British feminist film critic, in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). She argues that Hollywood films use women as “erotic objects” in order to provide pleasurable experience for heterosexual male audiences. According to her, the male gaze can be seen as active and passive roles that satisfy the spectator, who in our culture is a man, which means a woman is the spectacle. “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure

Although Western society has changed a great deal over the last few centuries. Women are still objectified in numerous art forms such as painting, advertising, and cinema. In particular, mainstream narrative cinema has been detrimental in its manufacturing of its image of women. I will chose a scene from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider to analyze in terms of how it demonstrates the male gaze.

The gaze deals with how the audience views the people presented in visual culture, in this case, adverts, magazines and Cinema. The ‘male gaze’ is the male ability to exercise control over women by representing them in visual means as passive, sexual objects of male desire. The power of men over women has always existed. They are seen as the more powerful and clever species. This control over women has been seen predominately in linguistics senses in past times. It is clear that there are more derogatory terms for women than there are for men. Men can also wolf whistle or cat-call in order to harass a woman but

Through exposure, the role of women as a visible visual icon, such as cinematic mechanisms fetishism serves to convince the position of the male audience as an absolute subject.

Today’s filmmakers have three areas to focus on: the event or theme of the film, the audience who will be watching the film, and lastly, the individual characters and the roles they play and how they are portrayed and interpreted. Many of these films bottom line objectives are to focus on the “erotic needs of the male ego.” The focus on fetishistic scopophilia tend to slant the view such that we see the world as being dominated by men and that woman are

The author, Jackie Stacey is a British feminist film historian. The main goal of her research is to understand the specific pleasure and engagements of British cinema audiences in the 1940s and 1950s. Stacey received 350 letters from women who went to the cinema 2-3 times a week during this period of wartime as cinema going was at an all-time high. Within the book, Stacey discusses Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze and how Mulvey’s analysis of the pleasures of Hollywood cinema led her to conclude that the spectator position offered is a ‘masculine’ one. She talks about how there are 3 looks within the dominant mode of Hollywood cinema; the camera(man), the editor and the director. She emphasizes on how all of these looks work together to create the effect of seeing the female characters as objects of desire through the eyes of the male characters.

Any discussion about gender and cinema must begin (though not end) with a thorough understanding of the male gaze. As one of the most pervasive talking points throughout the history of the cinema and film theory, an understanding of the male gaze from classical Hollywood cinema until today is

Feminist, Laura Mulvey (1975) had created the concept of the 'male 'gaze'. This is explained as to how visual culture has the tendency to represent the world and mainly females from a male perspective. Media, art, politics and music, are all still very highly male dominated, the media uses the 'male gaze' or male perception to perceive women as objects who enjoy having the male attention. In advertising,

The “Male Gaze”. In 1975, feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay entitled "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" defined a new phrase the “Male Gaze”. Mulvey explained the phrase as a filter that is placed onto various mediums such as film that depict the world and women from a masculine point of view and in terms of men's ‘male dominance over women’. This gaze according to Mulvey, “sexualizes and objectifies the woman”.

Theorist, E. Ann Kaplan in her work, “Is the Gaze Male?”, analyses the portrayal of women in film using Laura Mulvey’s “Gaze’ theory and psychoanalysis. In addition, Kaplan states that historically, females have been the central focus on only the melodrama genre, and while melodrama exposes the constraints and limitations that the family places on women, at the same time, gets women to accept those constraints as inevitable and normal. Kaplan argues that our culture is deeply rooted in “masculine” and “feminine, and dominance-submission patterns. In the end, she concludes that the exclusion from male culture provides an avenue to affect change in film and society. I partially agree with Kaplan that some women take pleasure from being the object of the male gaze as I think that is not entirely true, and specifically, this generalization does not apply to lesbians.

Media, especially Hollywood Film, has been one of the foremost vehicles for the perpetuation of masculine hegemony, not only in the West, but the world over. Much of our behavioural cues are taken from what we observe on-screen. The question of whether or not life imitates art is central in attempting to understand how our desires come to exist in the first place, and to what degree these desires are natural, or a byproduct of the incessant behavioural suggestions we consume via the screen. The concept of what is masculine is not cut-and-dried, but Hollywood has had a way of portraying a clear hegemonically ideal man -- he is suave, intelligent, usually wealthy (or at least highly agentic by other means such as sheer force of presence) ; he

In the early 1990s Laura Mulvey’s thesis concerning the patriarchal structure of an active male gaze has influenced feminist film critiques and Hollywood. Mulvey’s project is to use psychoanalysis to uncover the power of patriarchy in Hollywood cinema. Patriarchal influence upon cinema is found primarily in pleasure (pleasure in looking) or as Freud’s has put it, scopophilia. Mulvey suggests that it may be possible to create a new for of cinema due to the fact that patriarchy power to control cinematic pleasure has revealed.

The images of women approach is an approach that sanctions us to examine the female characters in a film and determine if they are a positive or negative representation of authentic women. The main focus of the female roles in She’s the Man is an unaccepted female soccer player and gregariously approved debutante. She’s the Man is a modern-day representation of Hollywood film demonstrating the images of women approach through a social aspect.

Mulvey’s argument is grounded in psychoanalytic theory, using the theory as a “political weapon” to “[demonstrate] the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (Mulvey 6). Art, particularly commercial art such as film, is grounded and shaped by society’s conscious and subconscious views. In addition to the patriarchal views Mulvey discusses in her paper, society also has ingrained ableist views that shape how people view the world and art. The idea of the “castrated woman” is central to Mulvey’s argument. She argues that this castrated woman “symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis” and “stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other”. If the penis represents manhood, then it also must represent the male societal role as provider and protector. Thus, those that cannot fulfill these roles are also symbolically castrated regardless of their gender. Although there are many reasons

Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, introduces video as a political weapon. Film reflects the unconscious language of patriarchy by being bound up in the sexual difference between male