Mulvey, Laura

Laura Mulvey (1941–) is a feminist psychoanalytic film theorist and avant-garde filmmaker. She is most widely known in her field for her 1975 article in the film theory journal Screen called “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” She is famous for taking film theory in a new direction toward Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and incorporating feminist theory into psychoanalytic film criticism. Mulvey argues for a political rather than an empirical reading of psychoanalysis and its relation to the cinema: specifically to the spectatorial position of the audience.

Psychoanalysis was previously seen as a justification for the status quo, both bourgeois and patriarchal. However, psychoanalysis can also be read not as a recommendation for a patriarchal society but as an analysis of one. Juliet Mitchell, another psychoanalytic feminist and author of Psychoanalysis and Feminism, states, “If we are interested in understanding and challenging the oppression of women, we cannot afford to neglect it.” This conception of psychoanalysis helps to contextualize Mulvey's work as well as her point of departure into the world of psychoanalysis and its relation to gender in film.

Mulvey's years of study in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in relation to film allowed her to explore the concepts of pleasure, voyeurism, identification, scopophilia, and narcissism in relation to the role of women in cinema. For Mulvey, scopophilia, following Freud's analysis, comes from the pleasure of viewing another person as a sexual object. Delight can also be taken in knowing that one is being watched or is being seen as the object of someone else's sexual desire. Mulvey sought to explore the concept of scopophilia, the pleasure one may experience from being watched, and the pleasure that comes from watching another (in this case as a sexual object).

Mulvey was also particularly concerned with the “male gaze” that the Hollywood film industry constructs for its viewers. The pleasure of identification, the second pleasure in Freud's reading, stems from narcissism, and Mulvey explored this in her art and her analysis of the film industry as well. She plays with the idea of the pleasure of seeing oneself in representational forms, from identification with the image seen on the screen. In this sense it is formed with the constitution of the ego and makes sense in the Lacanian realm of the “mirror stage.” Jacques Lacan posited that the exact moment when a child can realize his or her own self in the mirror is a crucial point in the development and constitution of the ego. A child cannot move into the Symbolic order (and into language as structure) and away from the Real (the realm of the mother's body) without this crucial realization.

Mulvey's work draws from Freudo-Lacanian readings/analyses and has often been of particular interest to feminist viewers and critics. If a woman's function (in the traditional psychoanalytic reading) is to raise her child into the Symbolic via the route of the Law of the Father, or to stand as a symbol of male castration (because she lacks a penis), then discovering how the woman is imaged as such in cinema and television helps women get closer to understanding the roots of their shared oppression. Mulvey suggests that women can take pleasure in the cinema only if they assume the role of the male spectator. This reading poses the ultimate challenge to feminist scholars and critics. Mulvey urges her readers and critics to accept her challenge, because she posits that these individuals prove that women can take pleasure in viewing the cinema not as a fetishized object, and not through dressing up (“the masquerade” or “transsexualism,” as other gender and media scholars, such as Joan Riviere and Mary Ann Doane, suggest).

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