Narrative Theories - Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey

(15 August 1941 - Present)
Laura Mulvey established the audience were placed into a masculine subject position and the role of women were objectified through the societal 'gaze'. Mulvey argues that films are constructed to reflect three societal concepts:

• How men (heterosexual) view women
• How women view themselves
• How women view other women.

Mulvey states the figure of a woman becomes the focus of the shot, the curvature of her hips, back etc.

Source A

Megan Fox is seen in source A wearing revealing clothes, denoting the curvature of her back and legs, which connotes sexual imagery in the audience. Also, Source A denotes her straddling a bike which serves as a phallic euphemism. Transformers series were primarily targeted at 12-year old heterosexual males and this poster is used as a ploy to reel the audience in. She is clearly objectified and acts as nothing but the medium for sexual fantasy.



The male response to Megan Fox and other celebrities causes young and impressionable females to reject the image of their body and wear provocative clothing and objectify themselves in hope of garnering similar amounts of attention as their media role models.

A celebrity famous for subjecting herself to a male object is Janet Jackson. She is known in her concerts for performing explicitly sexual dance moves and singing sexual lyrics, particularly in her Live In Hawaii performance of Would You Mind? (There is no way I'm posting this link, I value my A-Levels, but you're welcome to search on youtube)

I'll leave you with this: "To gaze it implies simply more than to look at - it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze" - Jonathan Schroeder