Graduation Year
2017
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.L.A.
Degree Name
Master of Liberal Arts (M.L.A.)
Degree Granting Department
Humanities and Cultural Studies
Major Professor
Scott Ferguson, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Amy Rust, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Maria Cizmic, Ph.D.
Keywords
psychoanalysis, masochism, courtly love, feminist film theory, French cinema
Abstract
In this project, I examine the relationship between female masochism, performance, and spectatorship in Michael Haneke’s film La Pianiste (2001). The film stages a relationship to sexuality that structures the subject’s excruciating negotiations with the other as always mediated by the law, the letter, or the body as instrument, which is allegorized by the protagonist’s occupation as a piano teacher. In my analysis, I identify the ways in which the film paradoxically offers a critique of mediation’s effect on the feminine position while encouraging viewers to confront the possibility that desire is only possible through these mediations. Contributing to feminist theory and psychoanalytic film theory, I foreground the way in which the film’s complex portrayal of female masochism produces indeterminacy via masochistic spectatorship. Ultimately, I argue that the unmarked position of feminine masochism, which is historically, psychoanalytically, and literarily reserved for male subjects, challenges the spectator to take enjoyment into account when approaching mediations of violence and sexuality.
Scholar Commons Citation
Jennings, Morgan J., ""There's a real hole here": Female Masochism and Spectatorship in Michael Haneke's La Pianiste" (2017). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/6869
