Laura Mulvey was born in Oxford in 1941. After studying history at St. Hilda's, Oxford University, she came to prominence in the early 1970s as a film theorist, writing for periodicals such as Spare Rib and Seven Days. Much of her early critical work investigated questions of spectatorial identification and its relationship to the male gaze, and her writings, particularly the 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," helped establish feminist film theory as a legitimate field of study.
Mulvey’s article argues mainly that the cinematic apparatus (specifically of classical Hollywood cinema) inevitably puts the spectator in a masculine subject position, with the figure of the woman...
