Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Lesson Plan

Mulvey argues that phallocentrism requires the castrated woman as its operating object. Can you think of examples of phallocentrism outside of film? How are women treated in these examples? How is the woman "castrated" in these examples?

In each of their answers, students should note a case in which male concerns or needs are taken as "normal" and female needs treated as problems or inconveniences (e.g., the lack of availability of sanitary napkins). They should look at specifically how these assumptions position women as abnormal, strange, or a deviation from normal maleness.

Mulvey approaches film as a symbolic system, a part of a representative order. Film is not the...