Women's place in the history of cinema is always a contentious one. Women have undoubtedly made their mark on the medium, but they have also been relegated to being second fiddles to men in such major capacities as producing and directing. Representations have often been a point of controversy, especially after Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in which he offered up the theory of the male gaze. According to that theory, Mulvey posited that female representations in cinema are created to maximize male pleasure.
