Which scholar wrote 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975), the influential essay that named the male gaze?
Choose an answer, then check it.
Film & Media Studies · Foundations
Gender and Media
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In 30 seconds
Gender and media is the study of how gender operates in film and television: who appears, in what roles, how often, and who makes the decisions behind the camera. Scholars document patterns, such as the narrow set of roles long available to women characters, and attribute theories, such as Laura Mulvey's male gaze Laura Mulvey's influential theory that classical narrative cinema organizes looking along gendered lines, presenting women as images to be looked at and men as bearers of the look. Full entry →, to their authors. The goal is describing patterns carefully and naming their limits, not claiming how any group essentially is.
Why this matters
Gender analysis makes viewing precise. Instead of saying that a film or show feels one-sided, you can point to documented patterns: the share of speaking roles, the roles open to women characters, the ages they occupy, or who is behind the camera. These measures come from published research, and theories such as the male gaze supply a vocabulary for how images organize looking. Understanding the difference between describing a pattern and essentializing Treating a group as if its members share fixed, inherent traits, rather than describing patterns that vary across texts and contexts. Full entry → a group keeps analysis honest and defensible, whether you are writing an essay, reading an industry report, or discussing a series with friends.
The college version
Documenting patterns of gender on screen
The study of gender and media begins with counting and describing, not assumptions. Researchers record who appears, how often, in what roles, and at what ages. The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University has tracked such measures for decades. In its report on the top-grossing U.S. films of 2025, 29% of films had female protagonists, down from 42% in 2024; 38% of speaking roles went to female characters; and 82% of films featured more male than female speaking characters. Female characters also skew younger: women aged sixty and older made up just 2% of major female characters, versus 8% of major male characters. The report cautions that the protagonist figure is volatile because it rests on the top 100 films, while speaking-role figures are more stable. A pattern is a distribution across many texts, not a verdict on any single film.
Recurring roles and the Bechdel test
Scholars have also documented recurring role patterns. Film critics have traced a virgin-temptress binary A documented pattern in which women characters are cast as either chaste and virtuous or sexualized and dangerous, traced by film critics from early cinema onward. Full entry → in early and classical Hollywood: women characters cast as chaste figures to be protected or sexualized figures to be punished, with little room between. The University of Arkansas open textbook Moving Pictures documents this pattern from the silent era through later decades, including its variations in film noir and the 1950s domestic comedy. A simpler gauge of women's presence, the Bechdel test A minimal heuristic asking whether a film has at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man; it gauges presence, not quality. Full entry →, comes from cartoonist Alison Bechdel's 1985 comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For: a work passes if it has at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. Bechdel credited the idea to her friend Liz Wallace and to Virginia Woolf. The test became widely used in the 2000s as shorthand for whether women are present. Its own history carries a limit: passing is a minimal threshold about presence, not a measure of depth, quality, or equality.
The male gaze: Mulvey's theory and its critics
In 1975, British film theorist Laura Mulvey published 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' in the journal Screen. Drawing on psychoanalytic concepts — scopophilia The pleasure of looking, which Mulvey's essay draws on to describe how cinema invites voyeuristic and identificatory forms of watching. Full entry →, voyeurism, narcissistic identification — she argued that classical Hollywood cinema organizes looking along gendered lines: women function as images to be looked at, while men function as bearers of the look. She identified three looks — the camera's, the spectator's, and the characters' within the film — arguing that narrative cinema invites spectators to align with the male protagonist's look. The male gaze is an influential theory, not a settled fact, and critics have questioned whether it assumes a single, implicitly male and heterosexual spectator. bell hooks proposed an 'oppositional gaze bell hooks's term for a critical way of looking adopted by spectators who do not see themselves reflected in mainstream images. Full entry →' for spectators who do not see themselves in mainstream images, and Mulvey herself revisited female spectatorship. The idea predates cinema, appearing in John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972).
The female gaze and queer readings
Feminist film scholarship did not stop at describing the male gaze. Theorists asked what female spectatorship looks like and whether women filmmakers construct different looking relations. Mary Ann Doane's work on the female spectator, Lorraine Gamman's essays on the enigma of the female gaze A scholarly term for looking relations constructed from a woman's perspective, developed by feminist film scholars as a response to and extension of male gaze theory. Full entry →, and Mulvey's own later reflections are standard reference points; scholars disagree about whether a single 'female gaze' exists or whether the term names a family of questions. Queer film scholarship developed a parallel line of analysis: queer reading An interpretive practice, developed in queer theory and film scholarship, that reads texts to bring out queer meanings not usually foregrounded. Full entry →, an interpretive practice from queer theory that reads mainstream texts to bring out queer meanings that dominant readings overlook. Media scholar Alexander Doty's Making Things Perfectly Queer (1993) is a landmark of this approach, and scholars such as Karen Hollinger analyzed lesbian spectatorship as a mutual gaze between women. These are attributed scholarly developments, interpretations to engage with rather than facts to memorize.
Behind the camera: documenting disparity
Patterns on screen connect to who makes media, though the link is a documented correlation, not a law. Women were a rarity behind the camera for most of cinema's history; Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber, and Ida Lupino are among the well-documented exceptions. In the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film's 2025 Celluloid Ceiling report, women comprised 13% of directors and 7% of cinematographers on the 250 top-grossing films, and 23% of directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers combined; 75% of those films employed ten or more men in pivotal behind-the-scenes roles, while only 7% employed ten or more women. USC's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that 12.1% of the directors of the top 100 films of 2023 were women, judged not meaningfully different from the year before, concluding that progress has stalled across its seventeen-year sample. These figures describe industries at particular moments and change with platform and definition.
Contemporary debates and the limits of description
Contemporary discussion of gender and media is contested; careful analysis keeps the debates distinguishable. Some argue that more women behind the camera are necessary for change; scholarship also notes that a woman director does not by herself guarantee any particular kind of film, since filmmakers work within shared conventions. The Bechdel test is debated: useful as a threshold, inadequate as a measure of quality. The male gaze is debated: powerful as an account of a dominant convention, incomplete as a description of every viewer. What ties these debates together is a methodological discipline: describe the pattern, name its source and scope, and resist the move from 'media often do this' to 'this group is essentially like that.' A statistic about speaking roles describes media output; it says nothing about what any person is naturally like. That distinction is what this lesson asks you to practice.
Eli explains
The same idea, in plain words
Explain it like I’m 10
Gender and media is the study of who shows up in movies and television, what they do, and who makes the pictures. Researchers count things: how many speaking roles go to women, what ages those characters are, what jobs they hold, and how many directors and writers are women. Those counts are patterns, and patterns can change. Laura Mulvey's male gaze is one famous theory about how cameras, characters, and audiences line up: the camera shows a woman as something to be looked at, the story gives the looking to a man, and the audience is invited to look along with him. It is a theory about how films are built, not a fact about every viewer. Saying that a pattern exists is not the same as saying any group is one way by nature.
Picture it like this
Think of a museum tour. The paintings hang on the walls, visitors walk the rooms, and the guide decides which works get the spotlight and how long everyone pauses at each one. A gaze analysis asks who is on the wall, who is doing the looking, and who wrote the tour.
Where the picture stops working
A museum tour has one guide, but a film is made by many people, and viewers bring their own histories to the screen. Patterns of looking are conventions, not laws: different filmmakers, eras, and audiences can organize the same image differently.
Worked example
Consider a two-minute sequence in a hypothetical crime drama. A detective questions a witness, and the scene is cut so that the witness appears only in slow close-ups that pause on her face and hands, while the detective stays offscreen and his questions arrive as voice-over. A formal observation: the editing gives the offscreen speaker the active look and gives the witness the position of being looked at. A careful claim: the sequence arranges looking so that one character controls what the viewer sees. What the claim does not say: that the actress is passive in real life, that every viewer experiences the scene the same way, or that the pattern proves anything about women generally. Describing the arrangement is analysis; extending it to a claim about an entire group is not.
Key takeaway
Gender analysis documents who appears in media, in what roles, and who makes media, and it attributes theories such as the male gaze to their authors. Describe the pattern first; claims about what any group is like require evidence far beyond a film's editing.
Quick check
3 questions here, of 5 in this lesson’s practice set. Answers stay hidden until you check.
In Mulvey's account of narrative cinema, which set best describes the three looks she identifies?
Choose an answer, then check it.
A film contains two women who appear in several scenes together, but every one of their conversations is about a man they are both dating. Does the film pass the Bechdel test?
Choose an answer, then check it.
Study tools & related lessonsYou’ll learn to · Common mistakes · Easily confused · Key vocabulary · Related
You’ll learn to
- Define gender and media as the study of gender-related patterns in media texts and media industries.
- Identify documented patterns of gender representation in film and television, including visibility, roles, and age.
- Explain Laura Mulvey's male gaze as an influential theory of looking relations, with its documented critiques.
- Distinguish the female gaze and queer readings as scholarly developments with named theorists.
- Apply quantitative findings about behind-the-camera roles to a factual claim about the industry.
- Evaluate whether a media claim describes a documented pattern or essentializes a group.
Common mistakes
Treating the male gaze as a fact about all viewers.
Present it as an influential theory proposed by Laura Mulvey in 1975, with documented critiques and later scholarly developments.
Equating the Bechdel test with quality of representation.
The test is a minimal threshold about women appearing and talking; passing it says little about depth, quality, or equality.
Confusing a documented pattern with an essential trait.
A statistic such as '38% of speaking roles' describes media output; it does not claim anything about what women or men are naturally like.
Citing behind-the-camera percentages without their scope or cautions.
Report figures with their exact scope (top 100 versus top 250 films, and year), and note when a study itself warns that a figure is volatile.
Easily confused
Male gaze vs. Female gaze
The male gaze is Mulvey's theory of how classical cinema organizes looking around a male spectator position; the female gaze is a later scholarly development asking how women's looking and women filmmakers construct different relations.
Pattern vs. Stereotype
A pattern is a documented, changeable distribution across texts (such as the share of speaking roles); a stereotype is a fixed, simplified image of a group that may be inaccurate.
Describing media vs. Essentializing a group
Describing what media do is a claim about texts and industries; essentializing claims that a group inherently is a certain way, which the evidence here does not support.
Key vocabulary
- male gaze
- Laura Mulvey's influential theory that classical narrative cinema organizes looking along gendered lines, presenting women as images to be looked at and men as bearers of the look.
- scopophilia
- The pleasure of looking, which Mulvey's essay draws on to describe how cinema invites voyeuristic and identificatory forms of watching.
- female gaze
- A scholarly term for looking relations constructed from a woman's perspective, developed by feminist film scholars as a response to and extension of male gaze theory.
- oppositional gaze
- bell hooks's term for a critical way of looking adopted by spectators who do not see themselves reflected in mainstream images.
- queer reading
- An interpretive practice, developed in queer theory and film scholarship, that reads texts to bring out queer meanings not usually foregrounded.
- Bechdel test
- A minimal heuristic asking whether a film has at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man; it gauges presence, not quality.
- virgin-temptress binary
- A documented pattern in which women characters are cast as either chaste and virtuous or sexualized and dangerous, traced by film critics from early cinema onward.
- stereotype
- A fixed, simplified, and often inaccurate image of a group that recurs across media texts.
- essentializing
- Treating a group as if its members share fixed, inherent traits, rather than describing patterns that vary across texts and contexts.
Sources & references
- Women in Cinema — University of Arkansas Libraries Pressbooks / Russell Leigh Sharman
- Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) — Laura Mulvey; copy hosted by Arizona State University course materials
- The Celluloid Ceiling: Employment of Behind-the-Scenes Women on Top Grossing U.S. Films in 2025 — Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, San Diego State University
- It's a Man's (Celluloid) World: Portrayals of Female Characters in the Top Grossing U.S. Films of 2025 — Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, San Diego State University
- Inclusion in the Director's Chair: Analysis of Director Gender and Race/Ethnicity Across the 1,700 Top Films from 2007 to 2023 — USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative (Stacy L. Smith and Katherine Pieper)
- Male gaze — Wikipedia
- Bechdel test — Wikipedia
- Queering — Wikipedia
- Making Things Perfectly Queer (Alexander Doty, 1993) — Open Library
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Researched 2026-08-21
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