Male gaze : le devenir absent du concept

Abstract The article questions the becoming of the concept of the “male gaze” theorized by Laura Mulvey, through the study of its reception among French and Francophone thinkers. Written in close dialogue with Freudian psychoanalysis, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) indicates that the ideological stakes of representation go beyond the content of what is shown to reveal how the unshown is inserted between the form and the unconscious. The question that arises is whether there are viable conceptual alternatives to the critique of male gaze, such as the notion of “female gaze.” My hypothesis is that, given certain resistances encountered about the male gaze in critical literature, it is important to question the conditions of the exclusion of the female gaze, both as a concept and as a phenomenon that can be identified within artistic forms. Since Mulvey’s intellectual trajectory was deeply marked by her encounter with French film critics, the article examines more broadly the reception of her theoretical proposals in the French-speaking area.