Laura Mulvey
Feminist Legacies
Laura Mulvey
Feminist Legacies
For information on how we process your data, read our Privacy Policy
Description
Laura Mulvey's importance and influence as a feminist filmmaker and theorist are explored in depth with critical essays by scholars, new conversations with filmmakers and thinkers, and previously unpublished writings by Mulvey herself.
With the publication of her influential 1975 essay, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', film theorist Laura Mulvey became a key figure in the women's liberation movement of the 1970s, imagining and affirming feminist ways of seeing. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Laura Mulvey: Feminist Legacies looks beyond Mulvey's contributions to the feminist seventies, and the assumption of its political limitations. Instead, by connecting her roles as film director, theorist, writer, and activist, established and emerging scholars re-emphasize the radical intent of Mulvey's theoretical and practical interventions. In doing so, they assert that her oeuvre articulates a sensibility and mode of inquiry that has been formative for feminist interventions into visual culture around the globe.
Including previously unpublished examples of her writing, along with new conversations with Martine Beugnet, Sheila Rowbotham, Yvonne Rainer, and Adeena Mey, this collection illuminates the histories that have shaped Mulvey's contributions to feminist film, art, thought, and politics. By tracing how Mulvey's work is a vital part of the feminist concerns of the present, the book makes it clear that not only are Mulvey's investigations into feminist visual culture ongoing, they also anticipate and impact scholarly directions in sensation, affect, materiality, race, and technology that are playing out within contemporary feminist debates.
Table of Contents
1. Yvonne Rainer: a conversation between Rainer and Mulvey historicising the feminist avant-garde and centering the moving female body within the cinematic frame.
2. Adeena Mey: a conversation between Mulvey and Mey on developing Mulvey's theory of the gaze in line with decolonial theory.
3. Sheila Rowbotham: a conversation between Mulvey on Rowbotham on activism and consciousness raising in the 1970s, and the ongoing importance of socialist feminist movements.
4. Martine Beugnet: a conversation between Mulvey and Beugnet that develops their existing dialogue in Feminisms (2015: Amsterdam University Press) on the nature of dematerialisation of the body, the digital image and the archive.
Reprints:
5. Laura Mulvey: A previously unpublished piece in which Mulvey reflects on her earliest memories of cinema and how her childhood fascination with the moving image came to inform her theorisation of the image as both scholar and filmmaker.
6. Laura Mulvey: A previously unpublished essay by Mulvey on the representation of the 1920s Flapper Girl, which also focusses on race and classical Hollywood's erasure of Black women.
7. Laura Mulvey: A re-print of an under-appreciated essay on cinema and colonialism.
8. Mandy Merck, “Mulvey's Manifesto.” Camera Obscura 66 (Vol. 22, No. 3): 1-23.
9. Catherine Grant (Courtauld), “Returning to Riddles,” in Lucy Reynolds, ed. Women Artists, Feminism, and the Moving Image (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019): 57-70
10. Nicolas Helm-Grovas, “Passionate Detachment.” Oxford Art Journal Vol. 44, Issue 1 (December 2021): 47-66.
New essays:
11. Catherine Grant (Birkbeck), “Repetition, Return, Reverie and Remix: Laura Mulvey as Mother of the Film Studies Video Essay”
12. Aparna Sharma, “Reading Mulvey: Feminist Conversations across Visual Culture”
13. So Mayer and Selina Robertson
This piece will take the form of a collaborative conversation about Laura Mulvey's work as a programmer and curator, and how we, collectively working under the title Club des Femmes, activate those practices as contemporary curators, especially with regard to programming her films within contemporary programmes.
14. Valeria Villegas Lindvall, “To oppose is to reframe”
15. Amelie Hastie, “Curiosity and Fetishism”
16. Alexandra Kokoli “'It was easier to act than to consider': The role of activism in Laura Mulvey's Iconoclasm”
17. Kimberly Lamm, “Laura Mulvey and Writing Psychoanalytic Feminism for the Longest Revolution”
18. Anna Backman Rogers, “Marilyn 24 x A Second: Mulvey, Monroe, and Cinematic Dead Time”
Note: We aim to commission a chapter devoted to sound in Mulvey's work.
Product details
| Published | 13 Nov 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 288 |
| ISBN | 9781839026638 |
| Imprint | British Film Institute |
| Illustrations | 30 bw illus |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Related Titles
