Uploaded November 2021 | Updated September 2026, 5 days ago

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In this video, we're continuing our investigation of Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" with the question of the "female gaze." This is the first in a series on the "female gaze," a term that importantly Mulvey didn't use in her essay but which was coined as a response to the concept of the "male gaze."

This video looks at only one possible (but ultimately problematic) definition of the female gaze: visual and narrative strategies for sexually objectifying men on screen for the consumption of heterosexual female spectators. To investigate the implications of this definition, we'll look at how the term "gaze" is generally used in academic discourse, including how the term was used by Jacques Lacan and Jean-Paul Sartre; we'll look Mulvey's text for clues for how she might have responded to this idea; and we'll briefly look at the film Magic Mike XXL as a case study.

For the full series on Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and the male gaze, see below:

Part 1: youtu.be/3CDhsL-OzaQ

Part 2: youtu.be/YgP2pyuCtC0

Part 3: youtu.be/yMX06goQlZY

Part 4: youtu.be/mkHAGJIoKHI