The British film scholar Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) provides an enticing mixture of political manifesto, hard-boiled theoretical argumentation and empirical film analysis. It depicts how classical Hollywood cinema reaffirms gendered power structures by incorporating the cinema audience into what Mulvey refers to as ‘the male gaze’. Drawing on psychoanalytical theory, Mulvey highlights how the spectator - through the positioning of the film camera, the editing and the way in which the narrative is constructed - is drawn into what she sees as a ‘male’ viewing position. This perspective remains influential in much of the public conversation about film and media and has inspired many feminist analyses of media and popular culture.