The Sexual Woman and Her Struggle for Subjectivity: Cruel Women in Sade, Sacher-Masoch, and Treut

Nietzsche mentions the cruel, sadistic woman who requires the whip to maltreat the male masochist. The masochistic projection of the cruel woman is embodied in Sade's female figures and in Sacher-Masoch's Wanda, among others. The cruel woman reappears in Monika Treut's work as the one who actively lives out her sexuality and consciously renounces the institutions of marriage and family. This paper traces the question of how far this re-emergence of the figure of the cruel woman in Treut's films can be attributed to a cultural-critical impulse, or whether she should be seen as constructed in the patriarchal image of woman. (SW)