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The Politics of VISUAL PLEASURE 30 years on: The Work
of Laura Mulvey
Saturday June 18th 2005
The Queen's Building
Emmanuel College
Cambridge, UK
2005 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the
publication of Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay ‘Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, which polemically
tracked the gendered nature of spectatorship in
Hollywood cinema. The essay appeared in the journal
Screen, which itself became the rallying point for a
new kind of post-’68, politically-impelled,
psychoanalytically-informed screen theory. In this
one-day conference, we acknowledge the importance of
Mulvey’s work, which became extraordinarily
influential in that rich interdisciplinary terrain
where ideas from post-structuralism flooded into film,
literary and cultural studies, stimulating innovative
directions in textual and phenomenological analyses
and in media and cultural sociology; but which also,
as significantly, envisaged a meeting point between
film theory and the practice of film-making. As a
consequence of its fertility, the essay entered the
canon and, as Mulvey has acknowledged, attained the
status of orthodoxy.
In the conference we ask: how has Mulvey’s work
subsequently developed? What is its legacy today and
for the future? Do its insights migrate well to new
objects, such as the soundtrack, or African cinema?
Can Mulvey’s approach be refashioned to analyse the
modes of filmic experience given by digital
technologies? Does the psychoanalytic core of Mulvey’s
work stand the test of time, in light of historical
and empirical studies of spectatorship? Does her work
have broader implications for psychoanalytic cultural
theory? What happened, in the embrace of Mulvey’s work
by the international academy, to the politics of
‘Visual Pleasure..’, and are they relevant to a
‘post-feminist’ present?
Among the speakers are Laura Mulvey, Mandy Merck,
Annette Kuhn, Emma Wilson, Diane Negra and Andrew
Webber, with Colin MacCabe, Henrietta Moore, Juliet
Mitchell, Mary Jacobus, David Trotter and others as
discussants and session chairs.
The conference will be of interest to scholars and
students from film, media and English studies, from
gender, cultural and music studies, to sociologists
and anthropologists of media and culture, as well as
to those engaged with psychoanalytic cultural theory.
The conference forms part of the activities of the
Cambridge Media Research Group. We gratefully
acknowledge the support of Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, the Department of Sociology and Faculty of
English, University of Cambridge.
Full details of the programme are available on the
event website: http://www.am-design.co.uk/mulvey.html
REGISTRATION
You will need to register in advance for the
conference. A registration fee of £12.50 for students
and £25.00 for non students, should be made payable to
'Cambridge University'.
Please download one of the registration forms below
and send it, with an enclosed cheque, to:
Heather Tilley
c/o New Hall College
Huntingdon Road
Cambridge, CB3 0DF
Download registration form [pdf document 160mb]:
http://www.am-design.co.uk/mrgweb/images/registration_form.pdf
Download registration form [word document 36mb]:
http://www.am-design.co.uk/mrgweb/images/registration_form.doc
For any enquiries regarding registration please email
Heather on: hat21@cam.ac.uk
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