LAURA

MULVEY’S THE
MALE GAZE:
THE ROLE OF
GENDER IN
FILMS

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 WHAT DO
THESE
PICTURES
HAVE IN
COMMON?

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 CONSIDER THESE…
According the UNICEF, the repeated
objectification and hypersexualization of
women’s bodies by the media contributes to
harmful gender stereotypes.
In a study of print media, researchers at
Wesleyan University found that on average,
across 58 different magazines, 51.8 percent of
advertisements that featured women portrayed
them as sex objects. However, when women
appeared in advertisements in men’s magazines,
they were objectified 76 percent of the time.
Media has "amplified age-old pressures for
teenage girls to conform to certain sexualized
narratives," according to a study published by
The American Journal of Psychiatry. 

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 BUT WHY DO THESE KINDS OF IMAGES STILL
MULTIPLY? WHO IS THE INTENDED AUDIENCE OF
SUCH IMAGES?

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 •In the fields of the visual arts, literature, and
film, women are often depicted from a
dominantly male and heterosexual perspective
•Women are presented as objects to be stared at
for the obvious pleasure of a male audience

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THE MALE GAZE
• In 1975, British film theorist Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of the
“male gaze”
• Loreck (2016): The “male gaze” invokes the sexual politics of the gaze
and suggests a sexualized way of looking that empowers men and
objectifies women. 
• In the male gaze, woman is visually positioned as an “object” of
heterosexual male desire. Her feelings, thoughts and her own sexual
drives are less important than her being “framed” by male desire.

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PAUSE AND
WATCH:

The Postman Rings Twice (1946)

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGFer3-Aguw

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ELABORATE

OBSERVE THE INTRODUCTION OF

THE FEMALE CHARACTER. WHAT
WAS FIRST “SEEN” BY THE
AUDIENCE?

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 What counts is what the heroine
provokes, or rather what she
represents. She is the one, or rather the
love or fear she inspires in the hero, or
else the concern he feels for her, who
makes him act the way he does. In
herself the woman has not the slightest
importance. ~ Bud Bottiecher
Laura Turner in the movie The Postman Always
Rings Twice (1946)

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 Laura Mulvey’s essay Visual
Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema, then further “set[s]
out to demonstrate how the
structure of Hollywood
films — camera angles,
lighting, editing — imposed
a masculine point of view
on audiences watching
passive, eroticized female
objects.” 

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RECOGNIZING THE MALE GAZE
• In cinema, the male gaze looks while the female body is looked at.
• This gaze can come from the audience, from a male character within the
film, or from the camera itself (Telfer, 2018).
• In Mammen’s (2020) article Today I Learnt: The Male Gaze Has Three
Perspectives, the three perspectives show that most of the content we
consume is made by a man for men.
• The male gaze has been around for so long that some critics argue that
you can easily recognize it.

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 Mulvey further
characterizes  the viewer of
cinema as being caught
within the “patriarchal order”
and, in accordance with a
certain feminist identity
politics, postulates an
“alienated subject” that exists
prior to the establishment of
such an order. 

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SCOPOPHILIA: THE LOVE OF LOOKING
• Mulvey argued that traditional Hollywood films respond to a
deep-seated drive known as “scopophilia”: the sexual pleasure
involved in looking. Mulvey argued that most popular movies
are filmed in ways that satisfy masculine scopophilia.
• As Mulvey wrote, women are characterized by their
“to-be-looked-at-ness” in cinema. Woman is “spectacle”, and
man is “the bearer of the look” (Loreck, 2016).

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THE MALE
GAZE: 40
YEARS ON
• Forty years later, Mulvey’s
points are still heavily
debated.
• Some argue that there
exists a double standard in
society as men can be
sexualized, too.

Chris Evans in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

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IS THERE A FEMALE GAZE?

Women in the Film Industry (Forster, 2018)

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 What all these tell us is that there is
still an overrepresentation of male
influences in cinema.

As Forster (2018) further posits, “The

overrepresentation of men in the
industry means most characters on
screen are male, and they’re usually
surrounded by elements that appeal
to, well, male audiences.”

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 If the male gaze objectifies
women, does the female gaze
objectify men?

Magic Mike (2012)

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“MAN-JECTIFICATION”

The film, according to some

critics, ushers in the era for
man-jectification. “in which
women can judge men’s
bodies openly — the way
their male counterparts
have long done for women”
(Dockertman, 2015).

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THE FEMALE GAZE
• The female gaze is not about asserting female dominance on screen.
• In 2016, at the Toronto Film Festival, American film director Joey
Soloway, argued that the female gaze is different from the male gaze
since “…the female gaze is really about using the presence of a female
perspective on screen to emphasize the story’s emotions and
characters.”
• If the male gaze is all about what men see, then the female gaze is about
making the audience feel what women see and experience (Forster,
2018).
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DEFINING THE FEMALE GAZE
• What is the female gaze then?
• “It’s emotional and intimate. It sees people as people. It seeks to
empathize rather than to objectify. (Or not.) It’s respectful, it’s technical,
it hasn’t had a chance to develop, it tells the truth, it involves physical
work, it’s feminine and unashamed, it’s part of an old-fashioned gender
binary, it should be studied and developed, it should be destroyed, it will
save us, it will hold us back.” ~ Tori Telfer (2018)

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THE FUTURE IS FEMALE
Nowadays, more and more are becoming
aware of the influence of the male gaze.

Filmmakers often attempt to avoid

presenting female characters as “mere”
sexual objects by giving them complex back
stories, strong motivations and an active
role in the plot of their story. Yet the
masculine gaze is still commonplace
(Loreck, 2016).
Did you know that Captain Marvel is the first female superhero to get a Captain Marvel (2019)
Marvel franchise back in 2017?

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#METOO & #ASKHERMORE

• Much can still be done in light of the #metoo and #askhermore movements.
• Hopefully, with the participation of more female writers, producers, cinematographers,
and directors, the kind of stories and storytelling women deserve will be highlighted.
• More importantly, we, as the audience, are now more educated about the influence of
the male gaze and help challenge the dominant masculine worldviews in film, arts,
literature, and culture.

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REFERENCES
• Dockterman, E. (2015). Magic Mike XXL and the Rise of Man-jectification. In Time Magazine. Retrieved
https://time.com/3849392/magic-mike-xxl-and-the-rise-of-man-jectification/.
• Forster, S. (2018). Yes, there’s such a thing as a ‘female gaze.’ But it’s not what you think. In Medium.
Retrieved from
https://medium.com/truly-social/yes-theres-such-a-thing-as-a-female-gaze-but-it-s-not-what-you-thin
k-d27be6fc2fed
• Loreck, J. (2016). Explainer: what does the ‘male gaze’ mean, and what about a female gaze? In The
Conversation. Retrieved from
https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-does-the-male-gaze-mean-and-what-about-a-female-gaz
e-52486#:~:text=Mulvey%20argued%20that%20most%20popular,women%20for%20a%20male%20vie
wer.
• Mambrol, N. (2017). Laura Mulvey, Male Gaze and the Feminist Film Theory. In Literary Theory and
Criticism. Retrieved from
https://literariness.org/2017/04/13/laura-mulvey-male-gaze-and-the-feminist-film-theory/
• Telfer, T. (2018). How Do We Define the Female Gaze in 2018? In Vulture. Retrieved from
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https://www.vulture.com/2018/08/how-do-we-define-the-female-gaze-in-2018.html