Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Born in England in 1941, Laura Mulvey attended Oxford University and earned a degree in history. She engaged actively in second-wave feminism, writing articles for feminist journals and even participating in a demonstration against the Miss World Contest staged in London in 1970. Mulvey was also interested in film and filmmaking. Although universities did not recognize cinema studies as an academic discipline when Mulvey was a young woman, she exchanged ideas with other cinephiles via discussion groups and film theory journals like Screen. With her husband, Peter Wollen, Mulvey produced two avant-garde films during the 1970s, Penthesilia: Queen of the Amazons (1974) and Riddles of the Sphinx (1977).

While Mulvey was not the first to mobilize psychoanalytic and Marxist theories for a feminist analysis of cinema (that credit goes to British film theorist, Claire Johnston), her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” revolutionized feminist film studies and film studies in general. Mulvey’s conclusion that the formal elements of cinema reproduce the values of society’s dominant ideology turned the course of film scholarship in a new direction, one that recognizes films as complex signifying systems. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” provoked debate, disagreement, and discussion in film circles for decades. Mulvey published her own afterthoughts and re-“visions” in a number of subsequent essays, several of which are collected (along with her original, 1975 essay) in Visual and Other Pleasures (1989; 2009).