Introduction: Visual pleasure and narrative cinema at forty

It is forty years since Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (“VP&NC”) was published in Screen (1975 mulvey, laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16 (3): 6–18. ), establishing—in the first two decades after its publication—the gendered gaze, its political implications and possible permutations, as feminist film theory's dominant fascinations. The debate around Mulvey's essay began—as Sue Thornham notes below—almost immediately and has continued, in diverse contexts, across the decades.