Male Gaze:

In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. 

The Male Gaze describes the practice in which where media is filtered through the lens of heterosexual men. In other words, the viewpoints of the heterosexual men is accepted as the norm, whereas the perspectives of all others are largely ignored.

Some examples of the male gaze in media include: Extraneous nudity by female characters. Slow camera pans of women’s bodies. Women wearing tight or occasion-inappropriate clothing when male characters are appropriately dressed.

Laura Mulvey:

Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London.

Laura Mulvey is a feminist film theorist from Britain, best known for her essay on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Her theories are influenced by the likes of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan whilst also including psychoanalysis and feminism in her works.