Laura Mulvey And The Male Gaze

What is the Gaze?:
This concept is how the audience views the people presented to them

This can be thought of in 3 different ways:

• How men look at women
• How women look at themselves
• How women look at other women

Laura Mulvey:

This theory was influenced by the work of the psychologist Freud and is very important to the Feminist Film theory movement and has been influential since the 70's. Mulvey stated that, especially in classic Hollywood films, women are used purely to provide visual pleasure to men, and that the audience are constructed in a manner where they are all expected to be men. Her concept of 'to-be-looked-at-ness' states that women were only shown on screen in classic Hollywood in order to provide men with visual pleasure and have an erotic impact. Mulvey argued that typically the key protagonist in a classic Hollywood film was male and the audience members were similarly typically expected to be men. The typical male audience member is aligned with the protagonist by identification, aspiration and admiration. So, the audience identify with the films protagonist and places themselves in the shoes of the 'hero' in the film. Furthermore, the influence of Freud, an influential psychoanalytic theorist to Mulvey's theory is the idea of castration anxiety which is what a person unconsciously thinks. For example: If a woman was not objectified the way she was in the classic Hollywood or placed in a position of lower authority a male would not feel as powerful.         

Features of the male gaze:

• The camera lingers on the curves of the female body
• Events that happen to women are (mostly) presented in the context of a mans reaction to the events
• Women are seen as 'objects'

Criticism's of the theory:

• Some women enjoy being looked at i.e. beauty pageants
• The gaze could directed towards the same gender for other (non sexual) reasons such as body image or clothing