The Danish director Lars von Trier is undoubtedly one of the world's most important and controversial filmmakers, and arguably so because of the depiction of women in his films. He has been criticized for subjecting his female characters to unacceptable levels of violence or reducing them to masochistic self-abnegation, as with Bess in Breaking the Waves, 'She' in Antichrist and Joe in Nymphomaniac. At other times, it is the women in his films who are dominant or break out in violence, as in his adaptation of Euripides' Medea, the conclusion of Dogville and perhaps throughout Nymphomaniac. Lars von Trier's Women confronts these dichotomies head on. Editors Rex Butler and David Denny do not take a position either for or against von Trier, but rather consider how both attitudes fall short of the real difficulty of his films, which may simply not conform to any kind of feminist or indeed anti-feminist politics as they are currently configured. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis and acknowledging the work of prior scholars on the films, Lars von Trier's Women reveals hidden resources for a renewed 'feminist' politics and social practice.

Rex Butler is Professor of Art History at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (1999), Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory (2005), Borges' Short Stories (2010), The Žižek Dictionary (2014), and Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? (2015). He has written for Film-Philosophy, contributed essays to a number of collections on cinema, and edited two volumes of Žižek's writings (Interrogating the Real, 2005; The Universal Exception, 2006).

David Denny is Associate Professor and current Chair of the Department of Culture and Media at Marylhurst University, USA. He has written and lectured extensively on Lars von Trier's work.

Introduction: The Question of Woman in Lars von Trier - Rex Butler (Monash University, Australia) and David Denny (Marylhurst University, USA)

Chapter 1: The Real of the Spirit, the Spirit of the Real - Rex Butler (Monash University, Australia)
Chapter 2: A Postmodern Family Romance: The Oedipal in Antichrist - David Denny (Marylhurst University, USA)
Chapter 3: Melancholia: Misogyny and the Sexuated Spectator - Jennifer Friedlander (Pomona College, USA)
Chapter 4: Nymphomaniac and the Aesthetics of Chance - Tarja Laine (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Chapter 5: On Cruelty: The female figure in Orchidégartneren (1977), Menthe - la bienheureuse (1979) and Befrielsesbilleder (1982)- Angelos Koutsourakis (University of New South Wales, Australia)
Chapter 6: After Antigone: Film Form and Feminine Jouissance - Hyon Joo Yoo (University of Vermont, USA)
Chapter 7: The Paradox of Being: Lars Von Trier's Women - Sheila Kunkle (Metropolitan State University, USA)
Chapter 8: The Divided Catastrophe: Melancholia and Female Subjectivity' - Todd McGowan (University of Vermont, USA)
Chapter 9: Nymphomaniac and the Problem of Female Pleasure' Hillary Neroni (University of Vermont, USA)
Chapter 10: Von Trier's Medea - Monique Rooney (Australian National University)
Chapter 11: The Eternal Irony of the Community: On von Trier's Women - Robert Sinnerbrink (Macquarie University, Australia)
Chapter 12: Turbulence and Urgency: von Trier's Melancholic Femininities at the End of Time - Magdalena Zolkos (Australian Catholic University)

Index