Can you summarize Laura Mulvey's use of Freud's Uncanny in her concept of the Male Gaze?
"Here’s a concise synthesis of how Laura Mulvey draws on Freud’s concept of the uncanny in her theory of the Male Gaze, particularly in her seminal 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema:
"🎥 Laura Mulvey, Freud, and the Uncanny in the Male Gaze
"🧠 Freud’s Influence
- Mulvey uses Freud’s psychoanalysis—especially his ideas on castration anxiety, the unconscious, and the uncanny—as a lens to critique how mainstream cinema constructs gendered spectatorship.
- She argues that women in film are often rendered as “to-be-looked-at” objects, embodying male desire and anxiety."
"👁️ The Male Gaze
- The Male Gaze is a cinematic structure where:
- Men are active agents (lookers, doers).
- Women are passive objects (looked-at, displayed).
- This gaze reflects and reinforces patriarchal power, embedding it into the visual language of film."
"🫣 The Uncanny Feminine
- Mulvey links the uncanny to the female body on screen:
- The woman becomes too visible, too stylized, too eroticized—evoking both desire and dread.
- She is familiar (as mother, lover, icon) yet estranged (as threat, mystery, absence).
- This mirrors Freud’s idea of the uncanny as the return of the repressed—in this case, repressed male fears of femininity and castration."
"🧬 The Woman as Bearer of Meaning
- Mulvey asserts that women in film are bearers of meaning, not makers of meaning.
- Their presence is often symbolic, ritualized, and uncanny—a projection of male unconscious anxieties."
"Would you like to explore how this framework could be expanded into a critique of modern media, or how the uncanny feminine might be reclaimed through alternative narrative structures?"
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/freud-hollywood-and-the-male-gaze/
https://www.filminquiry.com/film-theory-basics-laura-mulvey-male-gaze-theory/
Did Mulvey ever consider the iconography of Male Physique Culture as a male version of her sense of the Uncanny?
"Excellent question, Gary. While Laura Mulvey herself did not extensively theorize male physique culture as a counterpart to the uncanny feminine in her original writings, her framework has inspired others to explore this terrain—particularly in relation to masculinity as spectacle and the visual representation of male bodies in cinema."
"🧠 Mulvey’s Male Gaze and the Uncanny Feminine
"In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), Mulvey:
- Uses Freud’s ideas (especially castration anxiety and scopophilia) to argue that women in film are rendered as passive objects of male desire.
- Frames the female body as a site of uncanny tension—desired yet feared, familiar yet estranged.
- Suggests that the male viewer identifies with the active male protagonist, while the female body becomes a symbolic threat."
"🧍♂️ Masculinity as Spectacle: A Parallel Development
"While Mulvey focused on the female body, scholars like Steve Neale later expanded the conversation to include male physique culture:
- Neale’s essay Masculinity as Spectacle (1983) explores how male bodies in cinema can also be objectified, especially in action films, sports films, and eroticized genres.
- He argues that heterosexual masculinity is often inscribed but not analyzed—it’s the invisible norm, yet it too can be rendered uncanny when stylized or eroticized.
- In certain contexts (e.g., bodybuilding, superhero films), the male body becomes a hyperreal icon, evoking narcissism, anxiety, and fragmentation."
"🫣 The Uncanny Male Body?
"While Mulvey didn’t explicitly apply Freud’s uncanny to male physique culture, the parallels are striking:
- The idealized male body (e.g., in superhero films or fitness media) can become uncanny—too perfect, too stylized, too alien.
- It evokes anxiety in male viewers (comparison, inadequacy) and ambivalence in others (desire vs. threat).
- Like the Doll or Iconic Woman, the Muscle God is a ritual mask, a projection of power that may conceal vulnerability or psychic disintegration."
"Would you like to explore how this could be developed into a comparative framework—The Uncanny Feminine vs. The Uncanny Masculine—each as a cultural icon that threatens the self through over-identification and mythic inflation? We could sketch it as a dual mythic system, or even as a narrative structure where both archetypes collide."
Body dysmorphia is a unisexual disposition.
