Male Gaze and Feminist Film: Self-reflexivity in Spring Breakers
Male Gaze and Feminist Film: Self-reflexivity in Spring Breakers

Summary/Abstract: Laura Mulvey’s 5 decade old polemic essay Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema had long been the cornerstone of feminist film theory. Using Freud’s theory of scopophilia she posited that the passive, helpless and usually eroticized female characters on screen only exist to drive the male characters to act, furthering the narrative and pleasing the male spectators. Her stance on the matter of the inescapable male gaze only persisted with the bibliography that followed. But what if a film’s self-reflexively uses the heavily eroticized but active characters to consciously exploit the male gaze and ultimately assert their personal power? Investigating Harmony Korine’s controversial 2012 film Spring Breakers through a third wave feminism lens and challenging Mulvey’s paradigm on the exclusively sadistic gaze, this study aims to explore the nuances of female agency and question the feasibility of a film simultaneously having strong and active female characters and appealing to the male gaze.

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