Laura Mulvey

When we think about this word, self-objectification, it's basically where we're thinking about how we live under constant appraisal.

And in 1997, there were a couple of psychologists, Barbara Fredrickson and Tommy Ann Roberts, who described how women who learn to watch their own bodies from the outside as an observer would... would label them as this self-objectification, and how that habit of monitoring basically fed their shame and anxiety, which builds on Laura Mulvey's idea of the male gaze from 1975, and that our whole visual culture positions women as a thing to look at, and that men are the ones doing the looking, And this is how research changes the conversation because a research from Goldsmiths in London ran three studies, Kian West was the name, a survey around 850 people and two studies at real naturist events and more naturist activity predicted greater life satisfaction.

And the route ran through better body image, higher self-esteem.

And people at the events reported immediate improvements on all three accounts of this.

So let us talk about the female gaze.

Is it the alternative? female gaze by oxford references is the ways in which women and girls look at other females at males and at things in the world because the male gaze theory rose from laura mulvey's essay titled the visual pleasures and narrative cinema i think it'd be helpful to try to understand the female gaze through cinema as well according to medium Women only account for 2% of producers, 19% of executive producers, 16% of editors, 11% of writers, 11% of directors, and 4% of cinematographers.

The over-representation of men in the industry means most characters on screen are male, and they are usually surrounded by elements that appeal to, well, male audiences.

But instead of being the opposite version of the male gaze, from my understanding, the female gaze isn't about asserting female dominance on screen.

And that's one of the reasons I think women's sport is so culturally powerful.

It changes the question from what does her body look like to what can her body do? And then along comes advertising and And very often, and in this case, changes the question straight back again to how does the body look? Film theorist Laura Mulvey gave us the concept of the male gaze.

In very simple terms, much of our visual culture has historically been constructed around men looking, gazing, and women looking.

being looked at.

Alrighty, folks.

The term male gaze was first used by filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1973 paper, Visual Pleasure title.

The paper describes how society is built to suit heterosexual men and the ways that this can be seen through the art men create.

Fair enough, especially in the 70s.

And, you know, he talked about the male gaze and And that is, I guess, where Mulvey got it from him or something like that.

And so then we got to her essay, Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.

And what was highly entertaining to me at the time was the fact that my professor, who described herself as a proud, bra-burning, second-wave feminist, was decidedly not a fan of Laura Mulvey.

And so after we went over her essay and talked about the male gaze and everything and went over just everything that went into that, The lesson plan also delved into several of Mulvey's detractors.

Well, you know what? No worries, because it's only women who are gonna say it from here on out.

So Laura Mulvey takes up this idea-

Yes.

[laughs]

It's an important essay, and it's also very much indebted to the sex binary that is fundamental to a lot of psychoanalytic concepts.

Okay.

So Mulvey is pushing back against the misogynistic premises of a lot of psychoanalysis, but she's also, like, participating in its cis normativity and its implicit pathologizing of transness, as we will see.

Mm-hmm.