Bookbeat

Masochism and Queer Desire in Film and Literature

by Barbara Mennel
Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
Available through Amazon

This book connects the invention of masochism by turn-of-the-century sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing and writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch to its contemporary appropriation by gay and lesbian filmmakers. Krafft-Ebing conceived of masochism as a literary perversion and as a gendered affliction. Mennel compares central texts by Sacher-Masoch with Monika Treut’s film Seduction: The Cruel Woman and Kutlug Ataman’s film Lola and Billy the Kid, negotiating contemporary feminist theory and queer studies organized around gender and sexuality, on the one hand, and the fetish and masquerade, on the other.

- Publisher

Editorial Reviews

“In her superb investigation of ‘masochistic aesthetics,’ Mennel returns to the constitutive texts of Sacher-Masoch and Krafft-Ebing, to engage with more recent debates in feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory concerning masochism’s triangulation of power, fantasy, and history. Parting ways with theoretical emphases on white masculinity and celebrations of performative subversion, Mennel argues that masochistic aesthetics ultimately fails to convert symbolic submission into social power for those traditionally positioned as fetishized Others in the fantasies of white male masochists: women, queers, disenfranchised ethnic groups. She challenges us to read the symptoms of two historic breakdowns of egalitarian ideologies and integrative state systems staged in literary and cinematic fantasies at the last two fins-de-siècle.”

-Katrin Sieg, Associate Professor of German, Georgetown University

“Mennel trains a keen bifocal lens reciprocally to illuminate the late nineteenth-century works of Krafft-Ebing and Sacher-Masoch and the late twentieth-century films of Treut and Ataman. She carefully retraces and finely nuances the interplay between such coordinates as masquerade and fetishism, queer and feminist theories, and psychoanalysis and politics. These juxtapositions result in a work as analytically rigorous as it is perceptive and daring.”

-Alice Kuzniar, Professor of German, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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