Toward a Fluid Cinematic Spectatorship and Desire: Revisiting Laura Mulvey’s Psychoanalytic Film Theories
Abstract
This thesis project re-evaluates Laura Mulvey’s film theories regarding psychoanalysis and the “male gaze,” first found in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). By re-evaluating the limitations of Mulvey’s use of the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic model this project seeks to understand the desires and processes of identification of cinematic spectators who reject the ideological imperative of the “male gaze”. As many critics have noted, Mulvey’s initial examination of cinema does not account for LGBTQ+ spectators and/or black spectators who occupy looking relations that reject cis-normative and heteronormative white Hollywood cinematic conventions. From this standpoint, we begin the first chapter by critiquing Mulvey’s gendering of cinematic conventions found in her theory of the “male gaze,” which does not address male masochistic desire, female desire or queer desire. In the second chapter, we continue to critique the rigid heterosexual binary of Mulvey’s work by articulating a new other-critical form of looking relations that derives from bell hooks’ term “the oppositional gaze”. Finally, in the third chapter we investigate the importance of fluidity in the cinematic gaze that can be found in LGBTQ+ spectatorship. In this final chapter, we address the “lesbian look” as a form of oppositional gaze that works against Mulvey’s “masculinized” female spectator. The overall objective of this project is to prioritize theoretical models that investigate cinematic spectatorship and desire as fluid rather than returning to rigid classifications of the gaze theory that limit sexuality, gender and/or race.