Male Gaze Theory : Laura Mulvey

The 'male gaze theory' is an idea that feminists believe draws attention to the imbalance between male and females, due to living in a predominately patriarchal society and has analysed how women are viewed by men, and because of the what the men believe: how women view themselves.

"Mulvey identifies three "looks" or perspectives that occur in film which serve to sexually objectify women"

1. how the male characters view the female characters

2. how the spectators view the female characters

3. the male spectator taking on the perspective of the male character; this is essentially joining 'look one' and 'look two'.

The third way of viewing ('look three') enables the male spectator to become the male character within the film, and therefore allows him to have the female character as his personal sex object, because he is viewing her in the way that the male character is.

"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, and numerous other anthologies. Her article was one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz had attempted to use psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema, but Mulvey's contribution was to inaugurate the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism.

Mulvey's article engaged in no empirical research on film audiences. She instead stated that she intended to make a "political use" of Freud and Lacan, and 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. In the era of classical Hollywood cinema, viewers were encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the film, who tended to be a man. Meanwhile, Hollywood female characters of the 1950s and 60s were, according to Mulvey, coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness." Mulvey suggests that there were two distinct modes of the male gaze of this era: "voyeuristic" (i.e. seeing women as 'whores') and "fetishistic" (i.e. seeing women as 'madonnas').

Mulvey argued that the only way to annihilate the "patriarchal" Hollywood system was to radically challenge and re-shape the filmic strategies of classical Hollywood with alternative feminist methods. She called for a new feminist avant-garde filmmaking that would rupture the magic and pleasure of classical Hollywood filmmaking. She wrote, "It is said that analysing pleasure or beauty annihilates it. That is the intention of this article."

Some feminists criticized "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," claiming that, while Mulvey believed that classical Hollywood cinema reflected and shaped the "patriarchal order," the perspective of her writing actually remained within that very heterosexual order. The article was thus said to have contradicted its "radical" claims, by actually being a covert perpetuation of heterosexual patriarchal order. This was because, in her article, Mulvey presupposes the spectator to be a heterosexual man. She was thus felt to be denying the existence of lesbian women, gay men, heterosexual women, and those outside of these identities.

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was the subject of much interdisciplinary discussion among film theorists that continued into the mid 1980s. Critics of the article objected to the fact that her argument implied the impossibility of genuine 'feminine' enjoyment of the classical Hollywood cinema, and to the fact that her argument did not seem to take into account spectatorships that were not organised along the normative lines of gender. For example, a metaphoric 'transvestism' might be possible when viewing a film – a male viewer might enjoy a 'feminine' point-of-view provided by a film, or vice versa; gay, lesbian and bisexual spectatorships might also be different. Her article also did not take into account the findings of the later wave of media audience studies on the complex nature of fan cultures and their interaction with stars. Gay male film theorists such as Richard Dyer have used Mulvey's work as a starting point to explore the complex projections that many gay men fix onto certain female stars (e.g. Liza Minnelli, Greta Garbo, Judy Garland).

Feminist critic Gaylyn Studlar wrote extensively to contradict Mulvey's central thesis that the spectator is male and derives visual pleasure from a dominant, sadistic perspective. Studlar suggested rather that visual pleasure for all audiences is derived from a passive, masochistic perspective, where the audience seeks to be powerless and overwhelmed by the cinematic image.

Mulvey later wrote that her article was meant to be a provocation or a manifesto, rather than a reasoned academic article that took all objections into account. She addressed many of her critics, and changed some of her opinions, in a follow-up article, "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'" (which also appears in the Visual and Other Pleasures collection)." Source : www.wikipedia.com