In a book that confronts our society's obsession with sexual
violence, Maria Tatar seeks the meaning behind one of the most
disturbing images of twentieth-century Western culture: the
violated female corpse. This image is so prevalent in painting,
literature, film, and, most recently, in mass media, that we rarely
question what is at stake in its representation. Tatar, however,
challenges us to consider what is taking place--both artistically
and socially--in the construction and circulation of scenes
depicting sexual murder. In examining images of sexual murder
("Lustmord"), she produces a riveting study of how art and murder
have intersected in the sexual politics of culture from Weimar
Germany to the present.
Tatar focuses attention on the politically turbulent Weimar
Republic, often viewed as the birthplace of a transgressive
avant-garde modernism, where representations of female sexual
mutilation abound. Here a revealing episode in the gender politics
of cultural production unfolds as male artists and writers, working
in a society consumed by fear of outside threats, envision women as
enemies that can be contained and mastered through transcendent
artistic expression. Not only does Tatar show that male artists
openly identified with real-life sexual murderers--George Grosz
posed as Jack the Ripper in a photograph where his model and future
wife was the target of his knife--but she also reveals the ways in
which victims were disavowed and erased.
Tatar first analyzes actual cases of sexual murder that aroused
wide public interest in Weimar Germany. She then considers how the
representation of murdered women in visual and literary works
functions as a strategy for managing social and sexual anxieties,
and shows how violence against women can be linked to the war
trauma, to urban pathologies, and to the politics of cultural
production and biological reproduction.
In exploring the complex relationship between victim and agent
in cases of sexual murder, Tatar explains how the roles came to be
destabilized and reversed, turning the perpetrator of criminal
deeds into a defenseless victim of seductive evil. Throughout the
West today, the creation of similar ideological constructions still
occurs in societies that have only recently begun to validate the
voices of its victims. Maria Tatar's book opens up an important
discussion for readers seeking to understand the forces behind
sexual violence and its portrayal in the cultural media throughout
this century.
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