Laura Mulvey- visual pleasure and narrative cinema

Lara Mulvey, a feminist film throrist wrote a seminal article called ‘Visual pleasure and Narrative cinema’ which was published in 1975 and is one of the most widely cited and anthologized articles in the whole of contemporary film theory. .
She did not undertake facts and figures but made use of Freudian psychoanalytic theory which focuses on ‘ subject positions’ and how they are constricted by media texts. Laura Mulvey can link to Freud who followed the psychoanalytical theory, as he believed in the unconscious mind. Similar to Laura Mulveys theory and her stating that women are felishized, Freud’s argues that there has to be a phallic object to replace the penis for example it can be an umbrella.
There is the infant male- who is attracted to his mother unconsciously and profoundly jealous of the father. And then there is the infant girl who is aware that she does not have a penis “penis envy” wherby the boy will be anxious to why the girl does not have a penis there fore he is scared that he may loose it. Freud says that boys then fetishize over other body parts of the female through phallic objects. He also believe d that the audience is constructed as male therefore the woman is forced to look from the male perspective and the process of scopophilia (which is to look) and parts of her body will be fetishized usually through a phallic object. This agrees with Fredu’s theory as he to is agreeing with the act that Women are there to be looked at and objectified, and also that the audience is encouraged to identify with the make as they drive the narrative forward.
Mulvey argues that various featured of cinema viewing conditions facilitate for the viewer both the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters and also the narcissistic (admiring yourself in a sense of self identification) process of identification with an ideal ego on the screen.