Abstract
Feminist film theorists have used psychoanalysis to examine how the male and female viewer relates to film. Laura Mulvey’s 1974 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ is used by theorists as a basis for developing ideas around issues of the spectator’s gender. Mulvey utilises Freudian theories about castration anxiety and scopophilia to explain the fascination of film for the male spectator. Mulvey argues that cinema reflects the patriarchal nature of Western culture, where men are the active/spectator while women are the passive/spectacle.
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Notes
- 1.
Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 15.
- 2.
Mulvey, 22.
- 3.
Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), 154.
- 4.
Carol J. Clover, ‘Her Body, Himself, Gender in the Slasher Film’, in Feminist Film Theory a Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 24.
- 5.
Mulvey, 22.
- 6.
Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory (London: Hodder, 1997), 71.
- 7.
Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994), 130.
- 8.
Mulvey, 20.
- 9.
Mulvey, 34.
- 10.
Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade’, in Feminist Film Theory A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 134.
- 11.
Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade’, 134.
- 12.
Barbara Creed, Phallic Panic Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005), 156.
- 13.
Mulvey, 67.
- 14.
Clover, ‘Her Body, Himself, Gender in the Slasher Film’, 234.
- 15.
Ibid.
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Smith, C. (2016). Feminist Film Theory. In: Jack the Ripper in Film and Culture. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59999-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59999-5_4
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