Knowra Male gaze Male gaze The male gaze describes visual representation organized around presumed heterosexual male desire, often positioning women as objects of looking and men as active viewers.
Laura Mulvey : A British feminist film theorist who introduced the male gaze into film criticism. Her account explains how classical cinema aligns spectatorship with masculine desire.
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema : Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay analyzing visual pleasure and gendered looking in classical narrative cinema. This essay first set out the influential account of the male gaze in film.
Female gaze : A way of looking or representing that centers women's perspectives, desires, or subjectivity. It is often proposed as a counterpoint, though it does not simply reverse the male gaze.
Bell hooks : An American scholar, cultural critic, and writer whose work addressed race, gender, and representation. Her critique showed how Mulvey's account could overlook Black women's distinct viewing positions.
Scopophilia : Pleasure derived from looking, especially when looking makes another person an object. Mulvey uses this concept to describe visual pleasure in classical narrative cinema.
Second-wave feminism : A feminist movement, especially prominent from the 1960s through the 1980s, that challenged gender inequality in social and cultural life. The essay's critique grew from feminist efforts to analyze women's representation and power.
Oppositional gaze : A critical mode of looking that challenges dominant representations and refuses passive spectatorship. bell hooks uses it to describe Black women's resistance to exclusionary screen images.
Intersectionality : A framework for analyzing how systems of power and social identities interact. It helps expose how the gaze varies with race, class, sexuality, and other relations.
Identification (psychology) : A psychological process in which someone adopts or experiences another person's perspective or attributes. Film can invite viewers to identify with an active protagonist who controls the look.
Classical Hollywood cinema : A style of American filmmaking associated with continuity editing, narrative clarity, and studio-era conventions. Mulvey used its narrative films to show how cinematic form can organize gendered looking.
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