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Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey

What Is The Male Gaze?

 
Laura Mulvey's "Male Gaze" theory suggests as the majority of media presented to a general audience is controlled by middle-aged heterosexual white men, we are often placed within a position where the audience has to look at a depiction of women through a rather misogynistic lens as this satisfies the desires of the media distributors. The “male gaze” invokes the sexual politics of the gaze and suggests a sexualized way of looking that empowers men and objectifies women. In the male gaze, women are visually positioned as an “object” of heterosexual male desire.


Scopophilia


in relation to the dominance of the male gaze in classical Hollywood cinema, Mulvey refers to scopophilia as the pleasure involved in looking at other people's bodies as (particularly, erotic) objects without being seen either by those on screen or by other members of the audience. Mulvey argues that cinema viewing conditions facilitate both the voyeuristic process of the objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with an ideal ego seen on the screen.




Examples in Cinema


This scene from Easy A is a great example as the argument of the male gaze can be discussed in two different lights. On one hand, the scene shows a woman who is trying to embrace a label that has been placed on her and showing that it doesn't affect her. however on the other hand it shows vividly how women are objectified within current society as words such as "skank" can be thrown around so easily with disregard of one's feelings.



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