BY ALLANA EAD

Laura Mulvey’s ‘Male Gaze Theory’

Who is Laura Mulvey?

Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist.

She believes that the world is a patriarchy and that men have the ‘active’ roles and women ‘passive’.

‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ was an essay written by Mulvey. The essay introduced the term ‘Male Gaze’ which is now a well known theory that is discussed frequently.

What is the ‘Male Gaze’?

The Male Gaze Theory, Developed by Mulvey, describes how the audience/the viewer is put into the perspective of a heterosexual male through the camera.

Mulvey believes that women should enjoy the attention of attracting the gaze, and put themselves in positions to be looked at.

How the women are presented

Mulvey identifies three "looks" or perspectives that occur in film which serve to sexually objectify women. - The first is the perspective of the male character on screen and how he perceives the female character. - The second is the perspective of the spectator as they see the female character on screen. - The third "look" joins the first two looks together: it is the male audience member's perspective of the male character in the film. This third perspective allows the male audience to take the female character as his own personal sex object because he can relate himself, through looking, to the male character in the film.

The Typical Focuses of The Male Gaze

Emphasising curves of the female body.Referring to women as objects rather than

people.The display of women is how men think they

should be perceived.Female viewers, view the content through the

eyes of a man.

The Male Gaze Example

The Male Gaze can be seen in Nicki Minaj’s video for her song ‘Anaconda’.

The video objectifies women and forces people to view the females via the male gaze.

The Video aims to emphasise certain parts of the women’s bodies so that all viewers view the content through the eyes of a man.

The video for this is below this slideshare on my blog.