Can there be a Female Gaze Visual Pleasure

Can there be a Female Gaze?

“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey • The gaze in Hollywood cinema can only be male. • Aim of this paper is to explore the possibility of a female gaze.

Laura Mulvey

The Piano – Jane Campion

Anorexia

Painful and harmful shoes

Body Piercing

Voyeurism • Voyeuristic visual pleasure is obtained through objectification of the female image. .

Woman as Bearer of the Bleeding Wound • She only exists in relation to castration • Woman stands as signifier for the male other

Scopophilia • One of the pleasures that Mulvey describes, which takes women as objects and controls them with the ‘gaze. ’ This creates pleasure for the male spectator, and for the woman spectator as well as she internalizes the message of beinglooked-at-ness.

Fetishism • “builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself” The woman becomes an icon

Patricia Mellencamp

ROMANCE OF FAIRY TALES

Dr. E. Ann Kaplan, Professor at Stony Brook

Sigmund Freud

Nancy Chodorow, Professor of Sociology at Berkeley

Mothers and Daughters

FATHERS

Oedipus Complex

Jessica Benjamin, Psychologist

Jessica Tandy

The Color Purple

Thelma and Louise

FULL MONTY

American Gigolo

Blue Steel