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are explored in depth with critical essays by scholars, new conversations with filmmakers and thinkers, and previously unpublished writings by Mulvey herself.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Including previously unpublished examples of her writing, along with new conversations with Martine Beugnet, Sheila Rowbotham, Yvonne Rainer, and Adeena Mey, this collection illuminates the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.