Nigerian Video Films and Female Spectatorship:

Classic feminist film theories drawing from psychoanalysis deny the neutrality o f the cinematic apparatus and posit a male gaze in films that obliterate the feminine on and off screen. Exemplified by Laura Mulvey's seminal work Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema’ , the positioning of women in such an analysis renders the female spectator non-existent or needing recourse to either a masochistic identification with the sexually objectified female or a transsexual alignment with the active male subject for active spectator ship. Anchored in a historically specific period of classical Hollywood cinema, how useful is Laura Mulvey’s argument of the ‘male gaze’ and the passive exhibitionist role of women in films as an analytical tool for female spectatorship in Nigeria