Laura Mulvey Quotes

It seems to be generally acknowledged that sexism is far from defeated, flourishing through religions and other reactionary ideologies, which would definitely and gladly erase the concept of feminism.

As Budd Boetticher has put it:

What counts is what the heroine provokes,or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, or who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.

One absolutely crucial change is that feminist film theory is today an academic subject to be studied and taught. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was a political intervention, primarily influenced by the Women's Liberation Movement and, in my specific case, a Women's Liberation study group, in which we read Freud and realised the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory for a feminist project.

[...] the film opens with the woman as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participating in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female ... In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness

Woman, then, stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of a woman still tied to her place as the bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

By now, a younger generation of women participate in extremely lively debates in which questions of gender, sexuality and representation on screens and across media are approached from perspectives that had not yet been articulated in the 1970s.

It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it.

Woman's desire is subjugated to her image (...) as bearer, not maker, of meaning.