Laura Mulvey > Quotes

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”
― Laura Mulvey, Visual And Other Pleasures

“Woman, then, stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of a woman still tied to her place as the bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”
― Laura Mulvey, Visual And Other Pleasures

“It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it.”
― Laura Mulvey, Visual And Other Pleasures

“[...] the film opens with the woman as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participating in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.”
― Laura Mulvey, Visual And Other Pleasures

“The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire too make good the lack that the phallus signifies.”
― Laura Mulvey, Visual And Other Pleasures

“As Budd Boetticher has put it:

What counts is what the heroine provokes,or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, or who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.”
― Laura Mulvey, Visual And Other Pleasures

“Woman's desire is subjugated to her image (...) as bearer, not maker, of meaning.”
― Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

“It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.”
― Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

“Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end.”
― Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

“Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by im- posing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”
― Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema