The Female Body: 21st Century Perspective(s) of Women’s Sexuality in the Post-World War Society
Keywords:
Women’s Sexuality; Post-World War Cinema; Female Sexuality; Malena; The Piano Teacher.Abstract
With the increasing fight for sexual agency for women in the 1920s, there was seen an increase in sexual freedom for women but this was only misconstrued as free accessibility for men to have their way with women, especially before and during the Second World War. After World War II ended, the relations between the sexes remained changed and caused further complications with the representation of female sexuality and its repercussions in a phallocentric society.This paper is going to look at two popular films of the 21st century, which represent female sexuality according to the time epochs they are set in. The first film that this paper will analyse is Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malèna (2000) which represents a sensual female protagonist and how the society, in the aftermath of the Second World War, reacts to such an unbound manifestation of female sexuality. The second film is Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) which is a very interesting representation of political issues paralleled with the unresolved sexuality of the protagonist, Erika Kohut. The former film enables us to look into society during the Second World War (the 1940s) and how the existing “norms'' dealt with a manifestation of “dangerous” female sexuality. The latter, on the other hand, forces us to look at the post-World War world by defamiliarizing it in the most disturbing way possible. Such a “disturbing” and “macabre” representation of female sexuality again raises questions on the repercussions of the world war on the relation of the sexes.
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