Male Gaze Theories: Laura Mulvey

Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975.
In study of cinematic spectatorship, she focused on how 'subject positions' are constructed by media texts. Mulvey noted that the pleasure involved in looking at other people’s bodies as (usually erotically) objects. “In the darkness of the cinema auditorium it is notable that one may look without being seen either by those on screen by other members of the audience”. Mulvey argues that various features of cinema viewing conditions makes it easy for the viewer to see both the voyeuristic process of objectifying females and also the narcissistic process of identification. She declares that in patriarchal society “Pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female”. As the spectator identifies with the main male character, he concentrates his look onto that of his like, so that he is in favor of the male character as he controls events and coincides with the lure of the erotic look. Traditional films present men as active and controlling subjects and treat women as passive objects of desire for men in both the story and in the audience, and therefore do not allow women to desire sexual subjects in their own right.
Mulvey distinguishes between two modes of viewing for the film spectator; voyeuristic and fetishistic. Voyeurism involves the controlling gaze and Mulvey claims that this associates with sadism: “Pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt - asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness”. Fetishism in contrast; “The substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous. This builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The erotic instinct is focused on the look alone”. She suggests this leads to “Overvaluation” of the female image and to the female movie star. Mulvey argues that the film spectator fluxes between the two.

Reference: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze09.html.