Session 6: Sex and Violence
Chair: Thomas Cooper

Single Girls and Serial Killers: Sex, Slaughter and the City
Fiona Sprott
MCA, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

How does a serial killer evolve into a romantic figure? Jack, our mysterious Ripper in Whitechapel, London 1888 set the stage for this evolution of serial murderers from heinous undesirable monsters into romanticised figures of enduring mystery, a vessel for dangerous desires spanning the genres of crime, horror, and romantic suspense fictions.  What is so alluring about a man in a cape, darting about in the shadows of foggy London killing women? How does a cannibal called Hannibal become a celebrity figure – what does Clarice Starling see in him? How can such a hideous crime define a landscape and become a tourist hot spot?  Jack the Ripper tours. Ripper as in ripped women open with such skill it was theorised he might be a surgeon. Perhaps its that age old fantasy about meeting a doctor and falling in love, except for the killing of course, but then romantic heroes are dark and mysterious. Single Girls and Serial Killers: Sex, Slaughter and the City is a ficto-critical investigation of what Isabel Cristina Pinedo terms “recreational terror”. Taking the form of darkly comic dramatic monologue, the work asks the question: How do you meet Mr Right in an age of Serial Killers? Drawing upon the conflicting narratives of two popular dramatic television series – Law and Order Special Victims Unit and Sex and the City – I explore how each show tells a different story of single women, sex, and the (same) city, juxtaposing fear and desire in stark contrast, and begging the question of how such stories of sex, slaughter and city-space are embodied by women? I theorise the eroticisation of violence, and recreational terror, and question the construction of women as victims in the game of serial murder and serial monogamy. 

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Domestic Terrorism: Female Exposure in Spanish Film
Eva Payno del Rio
Goldsmith's College, London, United Kingdom

Film provides us with a unique medium to provoke discussion about domestic violence. Little has been written on women in contemporary Spanish film, and much less on their subject positions under domestic terrorism. A social taboo until very recently, sexual violence requires urgent attention and can be seen as a pervasive narrative in contemporary popular culture, specifically in film.  To further explore how female subjectivity repositions itself, I will refer to two cinematic discourses that depict such concerning issue.  Julio Medem’s La ardilla roja (1993) and Icíar Bollaín’s Te doy mis ojos (2003), contribute to reformulate the perspective of the female subject under either physical or psychological. The goal of this study is to explore both filmmakers’ representations of domestic violence and its repercussion in contemporary Spain.  Psychoanalysis is the only discourse that offers a theory of the subject of the unconscious, becoming crucial for an interpretation beyond sexual difference.  While psychoanalysis is seen as patriarchal in its theory of the phallus as the privileged signifier, it is also used to deconstruct and to expose the workings of patriarchy.  Since representation of woman has been constructed within a patriarchal symbolic realm, its evaluation and redefinition is pertinent. Therefore, two main issues are the focus of this study; the first concerns the way in which we theorise the representation of women.  The second concerns the position of the subject as a subject, and the subject’s exposure under domestic violence.  How does psychological aggression or violent reactions affect women?  Can we establish a relationship between such abuses with those currently undertaking our planet?  Both films formulate a quest on the spectator to reflect on this issue that unfortunately affects women all over the world, not only to subvert and undermine the dominant prevalence of patriarchal views, but more importantly, as it aims to generate new critical debates.

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Violence, Subjectivity and Subjection: Two Versions of Sade
Viola Brisolin
Center for European Studies University College, London, United Kingdom

In my paper I wish to explore the relationships between subjectivity, subjection and violence as they emerge from a joint reading of Roland Barthes’s and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s interpretations of Sade’s work. My discussion will focus predominantly on Pasolini’s film Saló or the 120 days of Sodom and on Barthes’s Sade, Fourier, Loyola, but I also wish to use a number of Pasolini’s and Barthes’s texts in order to contextualise and clarify their complex stances. Lacan’s Kant avec Sade and his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis will also be central to my analysis. In particular, my aim will be to show that Sade represents for both Barthes and Pasolini a catalyst around which burning, possibly irresolvable issues revolve: the uneasy condition of the modern subject more and more perceived as being under siege in its ‘own’ world as well as its servitude to the violence of the socio-political superego.
In Sade, Fourier, Loyola Barthes made a strong case for the purely linguistic and phantasmatic nature of the Sadean universe, thereby ruling out the possibility of a realist interpretation. In line with this argument, Barthes detected in Saló a betrayal of the very essence of Sadean writing: Pasolini represented with ruthless accuracy something whose essence was to be beyond the grasp of visual representation. Yet I will argue that Pasolini’s film does not set out to represent the unrepresentable, or to bestow the Sadean fantasy with the plenitude of its visual realisation, thereby destroying its essence. Rather, by using a Lacanian framework, I will contend that what is foregrounded in Salò is the very structure of the Sadean phantasmatic universe.
I will try to shed light on Pasolini’s triangular analogy between sadism, fascism and society of mass consumption by using Lacan’s Kant avec Sade:  it is precisely in this essay that Lacan offers a novel interpretation of the Sadean executioner, seeing the latter not as someone who exploits and reifies the Other, but rather as the blind, self-reified servant of the Other as superego. Similarly, in Pasolini’s Salò the unappeasable desire for violence is shown to come from the field of the Other.
In this scenario the problem of subjectivation arises most forcefully. Barthes’s reading offers an intriguing problematisation, because whereas Pasolini may appear to foreclose the very possibility of ever reclaiming one’s own freedom from the forces that alienate it – both in Salò and in coeval works conceptually close to the film’s ideological pessimism – Barthes contends that in Sade a modality of reclamation is actualised that fissures the socio-political superegotic violence inscribed in the symbolic order. However, I will suggest that the inappeasable thirst for violence present in the Sadean universe cannot be cancelled out completely. Creativity and the renegotiation of language are not beyond the logic of dependence to violence that Pasolini’s film portrays so dramatically. So, if on the one hand Pasolini’s rendition seems to haunt Barthes’s reading by highlighting its blind spot, on the other hand it problematically reconfirms that subjection is inescapable.