"The Male Gaze"

Laura Mulvey and the Male Gaze -

Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist who was educated at st Hilda's College in Oxford. At this moment in time she is currently a professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck University of London. Mulvey worked at the British Film Institute for many years before taking up her current position.

The concept of a gaze is were you address how an audience views people and the way that they are being presented. In 1975 Laura Mulvey created the term "Male Gaze" for feminists it represented..

-How men look at woman

-How women look at themselves

-How women look at other women

Laura Mulvey believed that film audiences always view characters from the general perspective of Heterosexual male.

Features of the Male Gaze

The main features of a male gaze are the way that the camera lingers on the curves of the female body, and the way in which events that occur to women are presented largely in the context of a man's reaction to the event that has occurred.

Laura Mulvey believed that this was degrading to women and it relegated women to the status of an object and made them seem like a they were not human beings and their role was to simply to be seen attractive in not only the male eye by the female eye too. It posed many confidence issues in the way in which women look at themselves and other women simply because of their appearance.

Below is a magazine cover of vogue which shows a women with a tiny figure that has a curvy waist line and her cleavage is on show this could be used as a perfect example of the male gaze because it shows how the magazine has used a attractive female to feature on their front cover