A Critical Review of Laura Mulvey’s Work: ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)’

Arif Rohman

School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Charles Sturt University

Cite:
Rohman, Arif. A Critical Review of Laura Mulvey’s Work: ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)’. Kompasiana, 13 December 2013.

The second feminist wave in the 1960s has influenced feminists to increase their ideology against patriarchy in almost all areas. One of the areas which made women very vulnerable is the issue of women in cinema. This is based on the assumption that Hollywood traditional movies have a strong gender bias and position women as subordinate (Marshment, 1997: 126). Therefore studying the representation of women in narrative cinema became a big issue due to the film fascination which could affect the spectators.

Mulvey in her seminal essay ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ tries to reveal the Hollywood misogyny which has its visual manipulation in the mainstream of narrative cinema. Using Freudian and Lacanian works of psychoanalysis, she argues that Hollywood traditional cinema represented the ideas and values of patriarchy and oppressed women by ‘male gaze’. Women were led to become erotic objects by ‘fetishistic scopophilia’ and ‘voyeuristic sadism’. By this, using psychoanalysis is appropriate as a ‘political weapon’ to criticism women and film...

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