Week 7: Gender & Representation

In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey argues that classic Hollywood films are built around the male gaze, meaning that they’re designed to please a heterosexual male viewer. Women in these films are usually passive, serving as eye candy rather than driving the story, while the men are the active heroes we’re meant to identify with.
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Mulvey pulls from Freud, talking about scopophilia (pleasure in looking) and how movies encourage audiences to objectify women. She also points out how female characters often exist in films just to be looked at, reinforcing traditional gender roles. Her solution to this is experimental and feminist cinema that challenges this structure.

The essay had a huge impact, shaping feminist and film studies. But it’s been critiqued for being too rigid; what about female viewers or different kinds of cinema? Even Mulvey herself revisited some of her ideas later on..