Interview with Laura Mulvey

Interview with Laura Mulvey for issue 6 of Diffractions on "Feminist Ghosts: The New Cultural Life of Feminism".

Interview conducted by Daniela Agostinho.

In this interview, film theorist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey looks back on her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) on the occasion of its 40th birthday, and thinks through the changes feminist (film) theory has undergone throughout the past decades.

Laura Mulvey was born in Oxford on 15 August 1941. After studying history at St. Hilda's, Oxford University, she came to prominence in the early 1970s as a film theorist, writing for periodicals such as Spare Rib and Seven Days. Much of her early critical work investigated questions of spectatorial identification and its relationship to the male gaze, and her writings, particularly the 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, helped establish feminist film theory as a legitimate field of study. Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.