Laura Mulvey’s article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema was published in 1975, has set out the concept of visual pleasure and explains it under a system looks in cinema. Her theory points out that men looked at women, men are the subjects of women, and to look at the object position; (women) accept their role of being looked at and creating visual pleasures for men as well as in the social reality. Her approaching is to use the same “political weapon” (“psychoanalytic theory”) that “the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (the way men used to oppress women) (Mulvey 483), with the hope to leave “the past behind without rejecting it” (Mulvey 485).
To analyze that the main bias of cinema lies in the obsessive psychological
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As stated that “the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” (Mulvey 490), she relates to the fetishistic looking, in which women can be seen as curiously and admirationaly look on; or it is considered as a bust to look fetish/ desired.
But Mulvey proved impotent how women can get out of this suffering. She wonders “how to fight the unconscious/ structured like a language, [...] while still caught within the language of patriarchy?” (Mulvey 484). Indeed, in the article The Ideological Impediment: Feminism and Film Theory, Jennifer Hammett said that women “constituted as subjects by patriarchal representations, women do not have the epistemological resources necessary to escape patriarchy” (Hammett 86). In fact, Mulvey does understand that psychoanalysis is "an important political weapon,” but this weapon often in the hands of men. In his essay The signification of the Phallus, Lacan tried to point out the difference between “to have” and “to be” the signifier, the phallus (Lacan 1309). He stated that