Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

“Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.” 

The tone of this sentence from the essay’s “Introduction” is confrontational and provocative, distinguishing it from the predominantly logical, measured rhetoric of the essay’s body. The word “appropriated” connotes a forceful seizure of the “weapon,” psychoanalysis, thereby implying the essay will use the patriarchy’s own weapon against itself. This is a clever rhetorical move, because many second-wave feminists (particularly American feminists) regarded psychoanalysis and its basic principles as contrary to women’s advancement. Finally, Mulvey’s use of the word “political” is noteworthy, as it emphasizes that, unlike other psychoanalytic studies of film, hers will expose how personal psychology, as a construct of patriarchal ideology, promotes political inequality.

“It gets us nearer to the roots of our oppression, it brings closer an articulation of the problem, it faces us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of language) while still caught within the language of the patriarchy?” 

Unlike the middle sections of the essay, in which an inconspicuous, “disembodied” narrative voice presents exposition and analysis, Mulvey inserts herself into this part of the “Introduction” by using the pronoun “us.” She identifies herself with those who are oppressed and prepared to fight against their oppressors. Moreover, she “embodies” her voice as female, which, given her analysis of how patriarchal structures silence women, marks her essay as subversive and transgressive for the simple fact that it is female-authored.