Lust murder
Parents: sex crime
Etymologically related: lust - murder
Lustmord (1995) - Maria Tatar [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
"In Fritz Lang's film M, which opens in a subtly unnerving manner when the innocent voice of a child chants this grisly rhyme, the words..." (more)
Definition
A lust murder is a homicide in which the offender stabs, cuts, pierces, slashes, or otherwise mutilates the sexual organs or areas of the victim's body. The mutilation of the victim may include evisceration, piquerism, and/or displacement of the genitalia. It also includes such activities as posing and propping of the body in different positions, generally sexual ones; insertion of objects into bodily orfices; anthropophagy (the consumption of human blood and/or flesh) and necrophilia (the performing of sex acts on a human corpse).
A lust murder begins with the obsessive compulsions of the offender. Generally, they have a sexual obsession with their victims, and organized lust murderers may stalk their victims for months or weeks before the actual killing. The signature component of the crime, that which names it a lust murder, is the killer acting out their fantasies with their victims and the bodies of those victims. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lust_murder, Feb 2004
Sex Murder (1922) - Otto Dix
Sex Murder (1922) - Otto Dix
image sourced here.
Otto Dix (December 2, 1891 - July 25, 1969) was a German expressionist and anti-war painter and a veteran of First World War. His most famous paintings were Metropolis (1928) and a 1932 triptych Trench Warfare. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Dix [Aug 2005]
Like the work of his friend and fellow veteran George Grosz, Dix's material was extremely critical of contemporary German society and often dwelled on the act of Lustmord, or sexual murder.
See also: Maria Tartar: Lustmord. Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. Princeton UP, 1995.
see also: art - 1922 - expressionism - Germany
Lustmord (1995) - Maria Tatar
First sentence:
SIPs: sexual murderers, sexual killers, murderous aggression, evil urges, sexual murders (more)
CAPs: World War, George Grosz, Otto Dix, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Jack the Ripper (more)
Patrice Petro, Art in America
A compelling chronicle of Weimar Germany's disturbing and pervasive fascination with the sexually motivated murder of women, Lustmord breaks new ground in our understanding of German art and culture during this turbulent period between the two world wars.... Tatar has written a brilliant book of art and cultural criticism, a book that scholars and theorists of the Weimar period will have to contend with for some years to come.
Barbara Kosta, The Women's Review of Books
Tatar's book is particularly relevant today, amid the heated debates over violence, even as the images become more brutal and sensational, and the camera more voyeuristic and merciless.