Word Weavers: Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey (1941-present) is a British film theorist, professor, filmmaker, feminist thinker, and writer. She is best known for her 1975 piece, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, which coined the term “the male gaze.”

For Further Reading: 

• Laura Mulvey’s Late Style
• Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 
• Film Theory 101 – Laura Mulvey: The Male Gaze Theory

This month, we’re talking about Word Weavers — people who coined terms, popularized words, and even created entirely new languages. These activists, writers, artists, and scholars used language to shape ideas and give voice to experiences that once had no name. 

History classes can get a bad rap, and sometimes for good reason. When we were students, we couldn’t help wondering... where were all the ladies at? Why were so many incredible stories missing from the typical curriculum? Enter, Womanica. On this Wonder Media Network podcast we explore the lives of inspiring women in history you may not know about, but definitely should.

Every weekday, listeners explore the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of groundbreaking women throughout history who have dramatically shaped the world around us. In each 5 minute episode, we’ll dive into the story behind one woman listeners may or may not know–but definitely should. These diverse women from across space and time are grouped into easily accessible and engaging monthly themes like Educators, Villains, Indigenous Storytellers, Activists, and many more. Womanica is hosted by WMN co-founder and award-winning journalist Jenny Kaplan. The bite-sized episodes pack painstakingly researched content into fun, entertaining, and addictive daily adventures.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello from Wonder Media Network. I'm Jenny Kaplan and this
is Womanica. This month we're talking about word beavers, people
who coined terms, popularized words, and even created entirely new languages.
These activists, writers, artists, and scholars used language to shape
ideas and give voice to experiences that once had no name.

(00:29):
Imagine a movie theater in early nineteen seventies London. The
lights dim and the projector hums. The film starts and
an actress SLINKs onto the screen. She's beautiful, sexy, the
pinnacle of femininity. The camera slowly pans up her voluptuous frame,
but instead of watching the screen, one woman in the

(00:52):
audience turns her head and observes everyone else watching the actress.
Today's Womanquin revealed these cinematic moments for what they really are.
Please welcome Laura Mulvey, the woman who coined the term
the male gaze. Laura was born in nineteen forty one
in Oxford, England. At six years old, she sat down

(01:12):
to watch her first film. From the opening credits to
the final scene, she was engrossed in other worlds on
the screen. After graduating from university, Laura became a proper cinophile,
going to movies with a group of fellow film lovers,
including her future husband Peter Wallin, She spent countless hours

(01:32):
sitting in movie theater seats. She became a regular at
the National Film Theater in London. She caught retrospectives in
Paris at the Cinema Tech Frances And Laura didn't just
love watching films, She loved analyzing, dissecting, and critiquing them.
She poured over Cayer de Cinema, a popular high brow
French film magazine. The magazine printed critiques of movies and

(01:55):
essays about the ethics and role of film. This is
where Laura first learned about the tour theory that the
director of a film is the equivalent to an author
of a book. Suddenly, cinema was more than entertainment. It
was also a way to project a voice. For Laura,
this realization coincided with her experience in the nineteen seventies

(02:16):
Women's liberation movement. The movement started influencing how she watched
her beloved films. Now, when she sat down on the
movie theater, Laura started feeling irritated. She started to notice
a disparity between male and female characters. Laura began analyzing
films with a group of friends through Resking College. Together,

(02:39):
they gravitated toward an unlikely choice, Freud. Laura didn't always
agree with Freud, especially when it came to his interpretation
of women, but Freud gave her a new vocabulary to
describe what she saw on screen. Dipping into the layers
of conscious and unconscious, Laura started to use Freudian terms
to look more critically at the film industry. Now, when

(03:01):
Laura sat down to watch her favorite films, she saw
something new. The female characters were used more as objects
of male desire than people with their own motives, needs,
and agency. Films, especially in Hollywood, were made from the
perspective of and to please the male eye. Once Laura
noticed it, she couldn't unsee the voyeurism embedded in Hollywood films.

(03:24):
But this didn't make Laura wary of film. Instead, she
got deeper into the trenches. She started making a name
for herself as a film theorist, writing for feminist counterculture
magazines like Spare rib In Seven Days. Her husband, Peter,
was in academia and film theory as well. Peter's work
brought the couple overseas to the United States in the

(03:45):
early nineteen seventies. Around this time, Laura was asked to
write a paper for the French department at the University
of Wisconsin. Laura, who always had a fraught relationship with writing,
suddenly found herself pouring out words around feminism, film, and
Freudian theories. These pages were then published in the essay

(04:07):
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. It was there where Laura
introduced the term the male gaze. Laura argues that films
directed and mostly written by men view and use their
female characters as sexual objects, something to be looked at
for pleasure. As Laura wrote, in a world ordered by
sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active

(04:30):
male and passive female. She argued that the way these
films are directed forces both male and female viewers to
see the film through the male gaze. In her eyes,
Hollywood wasn't an entertainment industry. It was a machine of exploitation.
Laura also stepped out of the cerebral world of theory
and decided to get behind the camera herself. Over several years,

(04:53):
she collaborated with Peter on six films spotlighting female protagonists,
women working through identi crises, the complex role of motherhood,
and navigating patriarchy in male fantasy. For these films, Laura
used avant garde camera techniques and played with point of view.
They were not widely screened and tended to have limited
runs due to their unconventional structure. Laura and Peter stopped

(05:17):
making films in the mid nineteen eighties amidst a larger
cultural shift. The women's movement of the nineteen seventies had
given rise to eighties conservatism under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
Laura was saddened that cinema might not change the world
the way she'd anticipated. Laura and Peter divorced in nineteen
ninety three. This year twenty twenty five marks the fiftieth

(05:41):
anniversary of Laura coining the male gaze. Since then, the
term has stepped off the screen and been applied to
many facets of the female experience, both within and outside
of cinema. Laura has said she's disappointed that the term
is still relevant. Which she sat down to write all
those years ago, she thought the term would fade, yet

(06:01):
it remains relevant to this day. Now in her eighties,
Laura is still teaching film and Media at Birkbeck University
of London. All month, we're talking about word beavers. For
more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram at Wamanica
Podcast special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and
co creator. Talk to you tomorrow