Laura Mulvey

• Laura Mulvey's germinal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was written in 1973 and published in 1975.

• It expands on this conception of the passive role of women in cinema to argue that film provides visual pleasure through scopophilia, and identification with the on-screen male actor.

• She says: "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness," and as a result, in film a woman is the "bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning."

• Mulvey argues that Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding how film creates such a space for female sexual objectification and exploitation through the combination of the patriarchal order of society, and 'looking' in itself as a pleasurable act of voyeurism, as "the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking."

• A woman stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other.

• Thinks film has a huge impact on the oppression of women.

• A psychoanalytical approach

• The image of woman is passive compared to the active GAZE OF MAN