Women's Bodies
In order to address the ways that cinema portrays the female character and her body, Mulvey recalls specific scenes from films. She mentions the bodies of female starlets and how they were manipulated, such as Marlene Dietrich's legs and Greta Garbo's face. Mulvey focuses on how these images of women are not whole but rather fragmented and figuratively "dismembered" so that female characters become fetishized objects.
Lacan's Mirror
Describing the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, Mulvey describes the importance of a child recognizing themselves in a mirror for the first time. This image, Mulvey explains, is the moment where the ego of the child has reached the stage of self-consciousness, where the child understands that they are not their mother but instead a separate being entirely. This image relates to film in that the spectator finds pleasure in comparing themselves to characters on screen.
Castration Complex
Mulvey relies on the psychoanalytic concept of castration throughout her essay. Though the notion of castration in psychoanalytic theory is figurative—it denotes, simply, woman's lack of a phallus and men's anxiety over that threat—the imagery associated with castration is nonetheless unsettling. Mulvey refers to women's lack of phallus as the "bleeding wound," a description that underscores the finality and entrapment associated with castration (804). As such, Mulvey connects the concept of physical castration to filmic agency, noting how women are subjugated within narratives in order to mitigate the unconscious threat they represent to male characters and viewers.
