Laura Mulvey Research

Laura Mulvey is a British film theorist and feminist. She came up with male gaze theory in 1975. This began from an essay named 'Visual pleasure and narrative Cinema' that she wrote, where it coined the term 'male gaze'  and then it became a very well known theory. The concept of 'gaze' is how one deals with how an audience views the person being presented. For feminists, there are 2 ways in which it can be thought of 1. How men look at women, 2. How women look at themselves and 3.How women look at other women. She believes that in film, audiences have to view the characters from a heterosexual males perspective.

Features of the male gaze include,The camera slows down and stills on a woman's curve's in a shot; imitating how a man stares at a woman. Denoting women this way on screen causes viewers to think that women are just objects of sexual desire within society. Another is where it relegates women to the status of objects. The female viewer must experience the narrative secondarily, by identification with the male.

Mulvey says that mainstream narrative cinema manipulates visual pleasure by coding the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order, introducing the male gaze; because of the active male and passive female, women are forced to see music videos and other forms of media through the perspective of a male.

This is most commonly known to occur in pop videos and mainstream chart music and it appears a lot all over music channels.

Here is 2 examples of a music video where this occurs is:


Beyoncé- Partition

This over the shoulder shot, of a man reading a newspaper suggests that Beyoncé is being viewed from a male gaze to viewers. Further more from similar angle Beyoncé  is denoted slowly opening her night gown and running her finger along her chest in zoomed in shot. This series of shots at the start of the video again reinforce the  idea that she is being viewed from a male perspective. Beyoncé is denoted carrying  out sexual acts and her body lingers on screen in long takes, which also sexualises her in the video. All in all this music video is an extreme example of how  women are sexualised on screen from a heterosexual man's point of view.

Nicki Minaj- Starships

The camera lingers on the curves of the female body, such as Nicki Minaj's video for 'Starships' and events which are occur to women are presented largely in the context of a man's reaction to these events. It relegates women to the status of objects.The female viewer must experience the narrative secondarily, by identification with the ale.