The term the male gaze first made an appearance in the essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema written by Laura Mulvey and published in the film studies journal Screen in 1975. The male gaze suggests that the way women are portrayed in film is often objectifying and limited. This is because the film industry is dominated by men and embedded within an overtly patriarchal order. Inevitably, representations of women in film are constructed from a masculine point of view.
Mulvey utilises a Freudian psychoanalytic framework in developing her argument which, she argues, is of importance to feminists as it “gets us nearer to the roots of our oppression” (1975 p. 7). In Freudian thinking, patriarchy can be explained in how gender identities are positioned in relation to various psychic processes that are instigated in infanthood and played out throughout one’s lifetime. Mulvey highlights, for instance, that the notion of castration – the idea that pre-lingual infant children, upon seeing the difference between men’s and women’s bodies, assume that women has become castrated – positions women as the other than lacks (is missing a penis). Deeply held and repressed ideas like this come to form powerful assumptions about gender, power, and relations between men and women. Psychoanalytic theory also posits that these deeply repressed assumptions continue to have bearing on social and cultural life. Unconscious ideas bleed out into conscious life in all sorts of way including, as Mulvey points out, through language and culture.
The visual pleasure of cinema is important in focusing Mulvey’s arguments concerning how women are depicted within film. Mulvey explains that cinema plays on some important unconscious drives and urges in clever ways providing an outlet for erotic drives such as scopophilia. In Freudian theory, scopophilia is a central sexual drive that finds pleasure in looking at others as objects to control. Relatedly, narcissism is also positioned by Mulvey as a form of visual pleasure experienced in cinema. Unlike, scopophilia which concerns the relationship between the viewer and the object of their gaze, narcissism, through the process of identification, is about the relationship between their viewer and their self, specifically, their ego. In this way, cinema viewers are structured as pleasure users in the cinematic experience whereby they derive pleasure both from the objectification and identification of those depicted on the screen, but never in equal measure!
The idea of the women as other underpins Mulvey’s analysis of narrative cinema and the construction of the male gaze. That is, how the viewer’s relationship to the characters (subjects) on the screen is constructed by the film makers and reflects a male position (a male gaze). Whether the viewer is male or female, they are forced to look upon the characters from the point of view constructed by the film makers. In this way, women depicted in film are invariably (at this time at least) positioned, or coded, as inferior in some way to their male counterparts. In cinema, looking is “split between active/male and passive/female” wherein “the determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure” (Mulvey, 1975 p. 11). Mulvey highlights how postures and positioning of female characters often connotes “to-be-looked-at-ness […] she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire” (ibid.).
A common misconception of Mulvey’s male gaze theory is that the male gaze is ubiquitous and persistent. Whilst certainly a pervasive and powerful patriarchal mechanism, it is nonetheless coded within cinema imagery in specific ways. Elaborating, Ben McCann explains that “the male gaze is comprised of three interconnected ‘looks’:
the look of the camera: how the film is shot (the framing, camera movement, editing and so forth)
the look of the characters: how male characters gaze at female characters
the look of the audience: how spectators are positioned to adopt a masculine viewpoint.
When the camera eroticises a woman, when male characters watch her, and when the audience shares this view, the male gaze is at its most powerful” (2025). Thus, the male gaze theory provides a useful tool in analysing media images in terms of relative gender positioning and dynamics as well as the role of audience in structuring mediated subjectivities.
Male gaze theory has been used much further than cinema and film theory, having had a considerable impact within media studies in general and has helped to shape how we think about the representation and objectification of women in the media. It has been used to analyse sexism in online media (e.g. Yang, 2022), magazine advertisements (e.g. Turner et al, 2007), and more broadly how women’s bodies are depicted in Western culture (Ponterotto, 2016). But, like any good theory, it is not without its opponents. Edward Snow (1989), for instance, argues that the theory can somewhat unwittingly sustain the gender power dynamics that it proposes to combat. This is because “male” is taken as a stable and continuous source of power and “female” as an object of this power. Additionally, he argues that theory often enables the analyst to avoid considering those aspects of the image (or movie) that are not easily understood as incorporated within the male gaze...a kind of conformational bias.
That said, for graphic design or visual communication scholars wielding this analytical tool, it has great potential in revealing the compositional (or explicit) representational tools that are still used to undermine women’s liberty from patriarchy. However, the male gaze should also be considered in relation to other ways of thinking about the audience gaze such as the queer gaze, the female gaze, the intersectional gaze, etc. (Evans and Gamman, 2005). These newer concepts have highlighted the analytical significance of Mulvey’s original idea in helping to understand better how particular identity positions are structured through media representation.
References:
Dang, Y. (2022) The Hegemonic Male Gaze in the Media Culture Influences of Advertisements on Female Beauty Standards and the Use of Beauty Filters on the Popular Social Media Platform. Proceedings of the 2022 3rd International Conference on Mental Health, Education and Human Development. PP 1042 – 1048.
Evans, C. and Gamman, L., (1995) The gaze revisited, or reviewing queer viewing. In Burston, P. and Richardson, C. A queer romance: Lesbians, gay men and popular culture. London: Routledge. pp.13-56.
McCann, B. (2025) Half a century of the ‘male gaze’: why Laura Mulvey’s pioneering theory still resonates today. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/half-a-century-of-the-male-gaze-why-laura-mulveys-pioneering-theory-still-resonates-today-256875
Monk-Turner, E. et al. (2008) Who is gazing at whom? A look at how sex is used in magazine advertisements. Journal of Gender Studies, 17(3), pp. 201–209.
Mulvey, L. (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen. 16: 3. PP 6 –18.
Ponterotto, D. (2016) Resisting the Male Gaze: Feminist Responses to the “Normatization” of the Female Body in Western Culture. Journal of International Women’s Studies. 17 (1). PP 133 – 151.
Snow, E. (1989) Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems. Representations, (25), 30–41.