Visual Pleasure

Visual pleasure refers to the enjoyment one feels when viewing an object of desire. Visual pleasure is a common topic in feminist theorizing, including the role it plays in the formation of women's individual and social identity. It has also been the subject of an article by British feminist film theorist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey. This entry focuses on Mulvey's article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and its relevance to feminist intervention, film theory, and psychoanalytic concepts of identity.

Central to Mulvey's ideas on visual pleasure is the notion of the unconscious in patriarchal society being structured around inequality: an inequality that positions women as the inferior “other.” In a short article written in 1973, “Fears, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious; or, You Don't Know What's Happening, Do You, Mr. Jones?” Mulvey reviewed the work of the British Pop artist Allen Jones. This article, along with her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” established Mulvey's engagement with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic thinking. Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry had already tried to configure psychoanalytic ideas in relation to the theorizing of the cinema, but Mulvey's essays begin a specific historical intersection of feminist intervention, film theory, and psychoanalysis.

Mulvey's article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” does not engage with any empirical research in relation to film audiences. Instead, Mulvey make a political use (in the sense of gender politics) of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, adapting some of their concepts to argue that classical Hollywood cinema positions the spectator (male or female) as masculine and the figure of the woman on screen as the “object” of desire. Mulvey's influential study links different types of [Page 868]looking and the pleasure derived from them to notions of gender, society, and difference. The emphasis in her work in the 1970s is placed on how these different forms of looking express inequality and oppression within capitalist society, but more particularly, patriarchal society. One approach to artworks is from the standpoint of aesthetic experience, but the other, adopted by Mulvey and others, involves treating artworks as heuristic devices that can teach us about the world and human identity. Such psychoanalytically inspired studies do not investigate the viewing practices of individuals in specific social contexts, but instead consider how subjects’ positions and identities are constructed by ideology.

The primal scopic scene considered by Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” echoes the search for identity through the intermediary of the image and conforms to Freudian and Lacanian paradigms; that is, models that center on the castration fear of the male viewer. This fear of castration invokes a crisis between the conception of the subject (the self) and its authentication. Mulvey points to a relationship between the young boy's horror of castration (in the Symbolic phase of development) symbolized by the metaphorically castrated body of the female, and the subsequent implications of the male viewers’ projection of that primal horror as a threat to his psychic coherence. According to Mulvey's thesis, when viewing filmic images of the female, two possible resolutions to this scopic crisis present themselves: either to disavow the fear of castration through a fetishization of the female body, or to avow the female by a certain disparagement of her symbolically mutilated form; in other words, the viewer can either reenact the original trauma by continually “investigating” the woman (the feminine) in an attempt to demystify her (which is counterbalanced by a devaluation of the woman) or else completely disavow the castration by substituting a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish. In this way, the feminine body becomes reassuring rather than dangerous. This strategy can lead to an overevaluation of the female, producing, for example, the cult of the female star. This second avenue—fetishistic scopophilia—amplifies the physical beauty of the feminine object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself.

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