How does "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" impact as a feminist study?

Question

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" by Laura Mulvey.

Course name: Literature in Film and Media.

Answer 1

Hi John,

I'm not 100% sure what your question is asking, but I'll give it a go.

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was one of the first papers to introduce a psychoanalytical framework through which to dissect cinema. It was also one of the first texts to also introduce an explicit feminist framework through which to critique movies, the paper is well known for introducing the term 'male gaze' into our lexicon. "The Male Gaze theory, in a nutshell, is where women in the media are viewed from the eyes of a heterosexual man, and that these women are represented as passive objects of male desire. Audiences are forced to view women from the point of view of a heterosexual male, even if they are heterosexual women or homosexual men" (filminquiry.com).

Hope this helps.