See with your mind as well as with your eyes

The career of feminist theorist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey has contributed to profoundly transforming our relationship with images. Since the 1970s, the theorist of the "male gaze" has continued to work on behalf of a mobilised gaze, conscious of the asymmetries between genders, asymmetries that structure the history of images, their reception and the ways in which they are produced.

The reception of her work, particularly in France, has often been based on the links she has forged with younger theorists, activists, translators and teachers who, moved by her texts, have enabled their translation and publication.

This is the case with the latest translation: Un Jardin, published by Burn-Aout (2025). Two of Laura Mulvey's most important texts ("The Pensive Spectator" and "The Possessive Spectator") are translated by the Women Remix collective.

In conversation with Clara Schulmann, a teacher at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, she discusses these effects of transmission and passing on, as well as questions of an engaged and curious gaze, eminently feminist.

Born in 1941, Laura Mulvey is a professor emeritus at Birkbeck University in London and a central figure in visual culture as it developed in the second half of the 20th century. In 1975, she published a provocative article in Screen magazine entitled "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Conceived as a feminist manifesto, this first text was a continuation of her activities within the London Women's Liberation Movement. Now an essential reference in the field of cultural studies, "Visual Pleasure..." inaugurated the intersection of gender theory and film studies by showing how patriarchal patterns structure Hollywood cinema: men are at the heart of the action, the driving force behind the progression of the narrative, while women are the centre of attention, objects of fascination who temporarily suspend the course of events. Recognising this form of conditioning of the visual pleasure of viewers regardless of their gender identity, Laura Mulvey called for a cinema that would redefine our relationship with images. While Laura Mulvey considers gender difference to be an essential lever for interpreting the reception of films, her analyses now focus more broadly on the question of desire and the way in which viewing practices reinvent the forms and uses of cinematic fascination: from the "possessive spectator" to the "pensive spectator", the gaze shifts, a position of power becomes a desire for knowledge.
Laura Mulvey is the author of several essays: Visual and Other Pleasures (1989, reissued in 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996, translated into French in 2019), Death 24x a Second (2006) and Afterimages: on Cinema, Women and Changing Times (2019) – which continue to have a considerable impact on the English-speaking critical and theoretical landscape.


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