21 Facts About Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey was born on 15 August 1941 and is a British feminist film theorist and filmmaker.

Laura Mulvey is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London.

Laura Mulvey previously taught at Bulmershe College, the London College of Printing, the University of East Anglia, and the British Film Institute.

Laura Mulvey has been awarded three honorary degrees: in 2006 a Doctor of Letters from the University of East Anglia; in 2009 a Doctor of Law from Concordia University; and in 2012 a Bloomsday Doctor of Literature from University College Dublin.

Laura Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen.

Laura Mulvey's contribution inaugurated the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism.

Laura Mulvey employs some of their concepts to argue that the cinematic apparatus of classical Hollywood cinema inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire and "the male gaze".

Meanwhile, Hollywood women characters of the 1950s and 1960s were, according to Laura Mulvey, coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness" while the camera positioning and the male viewer constituted the "bearer of the look".

Furthermore, Laura Mulvey explores the concept of scopophilia in relation to two axes: one of activity and one of passivity.

Furthermore, as regards the fetishistic mode of the male gaze as suggested by Laura Mulvey, this is one way in which the threat of castration is solved.

Laura Mulvey explores Jacques Lacan's concepts of ego formation and the mirror stage.

Laura Mulvey argues that the only way to annihilate the patriarchal Hollywood system is to radically challenge and re-shape the filmic strategies of classical Hollywood with alternative feminist methods.

Laura Mulvey calls for a new feminist avant-garde filmmaking that would rupture the narrative pleasure of classical Hollywood filmmaking.

Critics of the article pointed out that Laura Mulvey's argument implies the impossibility of the enjoyment of classical Hollywood cinema by women, and that her argument did not seem to take into account spectatorship not organized along normative gender lines.

Laura Mulvey's article was written before the findings of the later wave of media audience studies on the complex nature of fan cultures and their interaction with stars.

Additionally, Laura Mulvey is criticized for not acknowledging other than white spectators.

From this viewpoint, by not recognizing racial differences, when Laura Mulvey refers to "women", she is only speaking about white women.

Laura Mulvey later wrote that her article was meant to be a provocation or a manifesto, rather than a reasoned academic article that took all objections into account.

Laura Mulvey addressed many of her critics, and clarified many of her points, in "Afterthoughts".

Laura Mulvey was prominent as an avant-garde filmmaker in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1991, Laura Mulvey returned to filmmaking with Disgraced Monuments, which she co-directed with Mark Lewis.