laura lauramulvey mulvey

“woman stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (Mulvey 834)

Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze refers to the objectification of women in film, specifically visually by the camera’s lens, due largely to the fact that men dominate the film industry and the industry operates under patriarchal capitalism.

“the female figure poses a deeper problem…her lack of a penis [implies] a threat of castration and hence unpleasure” (Mulvey 840). She goes on to explain the ways in which men react to this castration anxiety, the relevant one to this argument being the “complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” (Mulvey 840).

“Marx’s analysis of commodities as the elementary form of capitalist wealth can thus be understood as an interpretation of the status of woman in so-called patriarchal societies” (Irigaray 192)