RESEARCH: LAURA MULVEY

'Film has been called an instrument of the male gaze as it produces representations of women, the good life, and sexual fantasy from a male point of view'(Schroeder 1998). This concept comes from the article Visual Pleasure and Narrtaive Cinema by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist. This article was published in 1975 and is one of the most widely cited and notable articles in the whole of contemporary film theory. Laura Mulvey declared her intention to make political use  of Freudian psychoanalytic theory in a study of cinematic spectatorship. These psychoanalytically studies of "spectatorship" focus on how "subject positions" are constructed by media texts. Mulvey focusses on how Freud refferred to (infantile) scopophilia, which is the pleasure of looking at other peoples bodies (particularly, erotic) objects. When we go to the cinema, the darkness of the auditorium allows us to look at the screen without being seen by other members of the audience. Mulvey argues that there are various feautires of the cinema viewing conditions that facilitate for the viewer, like the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic process of identification with the ideal image and ego seen on the screen. She also states that in a patriarchal society the pleasure in looking has been split between both active male and passive female. 

This is reflected in the dominant forms of cinema. For example, narrative films in Hollywood not only typically focusses on a male protagonist but also assume a male spectator. In traditional, hollywood, cinematic films, men are presented as active, controlling subjects that treat women as passive objects. Women are treated as passive objects of desire for men. These types of films place women in relation to "the controlling male gaze" presenting them as objects of desire and as 'spectacle'for men to look at. Men do the looking, and women are there to be looked at. 

Today we watched the Miley Cyrus's music video, Wrecking Ball, which demonstrates Mulvey's idea of "the male gaze". Miley Cyrus in this case, is presented as an object of desire for men to look at. She is seen as a desiring sexual object as she swings, half naked, on a large stone ball.