When Women Kill: Questions of Agency and Subjectivity (Transformations)

When Women Kill Why are we so reluctant to believe that women can mean to kill? Based on case studies from Canada, the...

Author: Belin Morrissey

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When Women Kill

Why are we so reluctant to believe that women can mean to kill? Based on case studies from Canada, the US, UK and Australia, this book examines the ways in which female killers are constructed in the media, in law and in feminist discourse almost invariably as victims rather than as actors in the crimes they commit. Morrissey argues that by denying the possibility of female agency in crimes of torture, rape and murder, feminist theorists are, with the best of intentions, actually denying women the full freedom to be human. The case studies cover, among others, the battered wife Pamela Sainsbury, who killed her husband as he slept, the serial killer Aileen Wournos, who murdered seven middle-aged men in Florida between 1989 and 1990, Tracey Wiggington, the so-called ‘lesbian vampire killer’, and Karla Homolka who helped her husband kill two teenage girls in St. Catherines, Ontario in 1993. This radical new book will be provocative reading for students and scholars alike in gender studies, criminology and cultural studies. Belinda Morrissey is Lecturer in Sociology at Charles Sturt University, Australia.

Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism Edited by:Maureen McNeil, Institute of Women’s Studies, Lancaster University Lynne Pearce, Department of English, Lancaster University Beverley Skeggs, Department of Sociology, Manchester University Advisory editorial board: Sara Ahmed, Lancaster University, UK; Linda Anderson, University of Newcasle upon Tyne, UK; Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago, USA; Rosemary Betterton, Lancaster University, UK; Christine Bold, Guelph University, Canada; Avtar Brah, University of London, UK; Tess Cosslett, Lancaster University, UK; Barbara Creed, University of Melbourne, Australia; Laura Doan, State University of New York at Geneseo, USA; Mary Evans, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK; Sneja Gunew, University of British Columbia, Canada; Donna Haraway, University of California at Santa Cruz, USA; Joanna Hodge, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK; Christina Hughes, University of Warwick, UK; Grace Jantzen, Manchester University, UK; Maria Jarvela, Oulu University, Finland; Annette Kuhn, Lancaster University, UK; Celia Lury, Goldsmiths College, London, UK; Gail Low, Dundee University, Scotland; Marcia Pointon, Manchester University, UK; Jenny Popay, University of Salford, UK; Elspeth Probyn, University of Sydney, Australia; Kay Schaffer, Adelaide University, Australia; Jackie Stacey, Lancaster University, UK; Penny Summerfield, Manchester University, UK; Jane Sunderland, Lancaster University, UK; Carol Thomas, Lancaster University, UK; Gill Valentine, University of Sheffield, UK; Lorna Weir, York University, Canada; Sue Wise, Lancaster University, UK; Alison Young, University of Melbourne, Australia. Other books in the series include:

Transformations

Thinking Through Feminism

Advertising and Consumer Citizenship

Edited by Sarah Ahmed, Jane Kilby, Celia Lury, Maureen McNeil and Beverley Skeggs

Gender, images and rights

Thinking Through the Skin Edited by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey

Mothering the Self

Anne M. Cronin

Mothers, daughters, subjects Stephanie Lawler

Strange Encounters

Embodied others in post-coloniality

When Women Kill

Sara Ahmed

Questions of agency and subjectivity Belinda Morrissey

Feminism and Autobiography

Texts, theories, methods Edited by Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield

When Women Kill Questions of agency and subjectivity

Belinda Morrissey

First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2003 Belinda Morrissey All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-42283-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-42465-4 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–26005–1 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–26006–X (pbk)

For Kristen

Contents

Acknowledgements 1 Traumatized discourses: narrating violence Introduction: killers and corpses 1 ‘Toolbox’ theorizing 4 Narrated and performed subjects 7 Narrative and legal discourse 11 Media narratives 14 Feminist legal narratives and metanarratives 20 Agency and the female subject 24 Conclusion 27 2 Versions of the self: narrating the subjectivities of women who kill Prologue: ‘no remorse, no apologies’ – Aileen Wuornos’ killings 30 Outline and overview 31 Bad or sad?: the law, the media and Aileen Wuornos 32 Feminist legal theory and the female subject 40 Narrated and performed selves: a model of subjectivity 53 Aileen Wuornos: unknowable other/performative self 63 Conclusion 65 3 Inconceivable survivors: battered women who kill Introduction 67 ‘Aggression, like charity, begins at home’ 68 ‘Man-made’ defences for battered women who kill 70 Battered woman syndrome 74 The killings 78 Responsible agents or forced to kill? 92 Recuperable subjects: battered women, feminism and legal theory 100

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4 Cultural anxiety and vampiric voracity: Tracey Wigginton’s ‘hunger’ Introduction: setting the (theoretical) scene 103 Without rhyme or reason: Tracey’s (non-)story 104 Eating Edward: the accomplices’ tale 105 Vexatious vampires 105 Depravity incarnate: mainstream legal and media responses 108 Recuperating the beast: Tracey Wigginton as victim 111 ‘Sexing the case’: feminist responses to Tracey Wigginton 115 Confessions of a vampire: Tracey Wigginton as author 118 The persistent popularity of vampires 122 Conclusion 132 5 Beyond villainy: the ‘limit’ cases of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck Introduction 134 Feminism’s ‘limit’ cases 134 ‘A child is being beaten (I am looking on)’: the beating fantasy, spectatorship and female sadism 136 Raping virgins 140 Women who rape 141 Homolka and Beck: sadists or masochists? voyeurs or victims? 145 Feminist silences 155 Conclusion 163 Conclusion: an odyssey around violent female subjects Notes Bibliography Index

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165 178 190 207

Acknowledgements

This project grew out of my doctoral thesis and so the first thanks must be to my supervisors, Zoë Sofoulis and Peta Bowden. Their contribution to every facet of this study was profound, and needless to say, without their aid, the thesis would never have been written in the first place. Thanks are also due to my editors at Routledge. Mari Shullaw was extraordinarily helpful during the early stages of rewriting the thesis into this book. Lynne Pearce and Maureen McNeil have been very supportive throughout, especially in the final stages. I wish to acknowledge the Centre for Cultural Research into Risk, at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia, which provided me with a large grant to undertake vital overseas research necessary to this project. I also wish to acknowledge the Faculty of Arts at Charles Sturt University, which provided seed grant funding for this project. Finally, I wish to thank my family, who lived, breathed and read this study in all its various stages of development, and who never lost faith that it would, some day, be completed.

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Traumatized discourses Narrating violence

Introduction: killers and corpses The urgency with which she stabbed him was impressive to behold. She really got stuck in. And with each jab a soft and guarded grunt came from her parted lips. She grunted as she stabbed him, but softly, like a lady. And with each jab he grunted in reply. They grunted back and forth. They sounded like a courting couple, grunting in the shadows of the pier. The frenzy of it, the lunging, plunging madness of it, really took it out of her. It’s physical and tiring work. He just kept standing there. He oozed and spurted like a plum. She hasn’t struck the fatal blow, the mortal, lethal, fatal blow that’ll put him on the ground. The big man that he was, she had to knife him endlessly. (Zahavi, 1991: 185–6)

Western societies have long retained a horror and fascination with the lethal. For, no matter how repetitively narrated, murders continue to traumatize the national psyche, never assimilated, never entirely understood.1 The terror they give rise to in the first instance can later give way to an obsessive preoccupation, where tales of these events are moulded through the twin forces of denial and repression. Only through such reworkings is trauma adequately repressed and fear reduced. Yet the very ineffectiveness of denial ironically guarantees the return of the traumatic repressed and ensures that murder remains always beyond incorporation and understanding, continually in need of fresh denials, new repressions. Murders are particularly traumatic because they invoke the abject. In the first instance, murder is abject in legal discourse and in other discourses that uphold and support the law because it is at one and the same time the most extreme rejection of legal prohibitions and the most potent reason for ‘the law’s’ continued importance. Legal regulations construct murder as a crime even while this act demonstrates the murderer’s utter contempt for any such regulations. Murder is also abject because of the nature and outcome of the act itself. By definition, murders involve the production of corpses and these, according to Julia Kristeva, are the most abject of any object. They are ‘death infecting life’, confusing the boundaries between one’s living self and

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Traumatized discourses

the corpse one will become, forcing recognition of the end into the heart of our here, our now, our aliveness (1982: 3–4). The deliberate nature of the murder victim’s demise only increases the horror of the resultant corpse. The murderer too drowns in death; in creating the corpse the killer touches the ultimate extremity of the abject, becoming themselves abject. Murders traumatize, then, not only in their persistent reminders that non-being is the ultimate and inevitable end for all beings, but also in their uncomfortable confirmation of every individual’s power to force others to undergo the terror of non-being, the appalling transformation from person to expellable detritus, waste, corpse. When women commit murder, their abjection is even more extreme than that of men who do the same. Legal and media narratives of murders committed by women indicate that these acts are also generally more traumatic for heteropatriarchal2 societies than those of men. For the fear of women, of their power to generate life and to take it away, runs deep in male dominated societies. Kristeva points out that the feminine is often aligned with the abject, the criminal, and that the potential for feminine evil is considered ever present (1982: 64–5). Female abjection relates largely to the very permeability of female bodies; through reproductive and sexual processes, female anatomy blurs the line between self and other, clean and unclean. The woman’s vagina is penetrable and engulfing, her menstrual blood is a primary abject pollutant, while her capacity to give birth raises the subject’s terror of encompassment and subsequent loss of self. Finally, the baby’s early dependence on the mother gives her enormous power, and the fear this evokes, combined with the abject nature of the female body, has been narrated repeatedly in myths and legends of evil and dangerous women throughout history.3 Women who kill confirm this archetypal feminine power, reinforcing the terrible antithesis to the myth of the good mother, reminding us that where creativity is located so too is destructiveness. The need to contain and limit the threat posed by such women is paramount in legal discourses, charged with enacting society’s official response to these crimes, and in media discourses, responsible for communicating that reaction to the general public. This study investigates the strategies mainstream legal and media discourses undertake when processing cases where women kill. I have chosen to analyse these kinds of cases because they demonstrate the desperate measures of discourses in crisis. For legal and media discourses are as traumatized by the murders women commit as the society from which they emanate. Judith Butler notes in Bodies That Matter that no discourse can ever ‘totalize the social field’ and that any attempt to so do is itself a symptom of the continued operation of trauma (1993: 191–2). The mainstream media and legal discourses’ attempts to narrate, understand and resolve events such as murders performed by women only make evident the impossibility of the coherent and seamless account of reality for which they strive. These discourses’ efforts to limit and control the crises which female killers


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produce thus provide in microcosm a stark picture of the exclusionary operation of discursive identity formation. In depicting the ‘constitutive outside’ (Butler, 1993: 188), events like the ones considered here also make evident that which is included, thereby revealing the parameters of the discourses with which they come in contact. Legal and media discourses’ first activity when considering cases where women have killed is to construct a subjectivity for the protagonist which becomes vitally important in her discursive acceptance or rejection. Representation of her acts, consideration of her reasons for the crime and her eventual sentencing are all dependent upon portrayals of the female killer’s image. These portrayals or narratives of subjectivity are delimited by the particular discourse in which she is represented. Mainstream legal discourse, for instance, enables the production of a certain range of subjectivities and constrains the development of others. It is part of this project to consider how six individual cases of female murderers are mapped on to the variety of subject positions offered in mainstream legal and media discourses, and further how trauma intervenes in the development of the subjectivities available to such women in these discourses. Finally, this book is concerned with metanarratives produced within feminist legal discourse which describe the performance of mainstream law and media. These critiques are vital to an understanding of the operation of gender bias in both discourses as well as to a consideration of legal reform. Furthermore, although a great many feminist studies have been undertaken of traditional legal discourse, little investigation has occurred into feminist metanarrational legal discourse. For while feminist legal discourse narrates the performance of mainstream legal and media discourses very effectively, it also generates its own narratives of women who kill. Through case study analysis, this book will show that feminist legal discourse, like mainstream law and media, relies on a limited range of subject positions in its attempts to encompass the varying figures of the murderess. Indeed, descriptions of these positions are often similar in both feminist and mainstream discourses in that such portrayals frequently lack agency. Thus, feminist constructions of violent female subjects are depicted in terms of their differences from and similarities with those proffered in mainstream legal and media discourses. Essentially, then, my project is to write metanarratives about each of the discourses in question. However, this does not mean that I locate myself in a mythic space external to either discourse or narrative. Rather, I analyse each discourse and narrative through the lens of another, seeing them as they are not self-consciously intended to be seen. This first chapter begins by considering the ways in which mainstream legal and media discourses attempt to contain the trauma engendered when women kill. Their reliance on narrative to construct subjectivities is shown as central to this process. Hence, an examination of the generic constraints and enablements of the available narrative models within such discourses’ tales of female killers concludes this section. Following this, the murderess’s

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traumatic effect on feminist legal discourse is revealed through consideration of both reactive theorizing and the development of qualitatively new subject positions for violent women. Some reasons for the denial of female agency found in many of these three discourses’ narratives of subjectivity are charted at this point. In conclusion, this chapter will consider feminist cultural studies and legal theorists’ attempts to develop new, agentic models of subjectivity for violent women.

‘Toolbox’ theorizing This work takes a cultural studies perspective to examine present constructions of the feminine through textual analysis of current representations of violent women. As the law and the media are two of the major institutions engaged in portraying violent women, they form the subjects of this study.4 I approach the discourses chosen for study as a cultural theorist, in particular laying no claim to any legal expertise. Each case study is analysed as a text, or rather as a set of narrational texts, which are considered in terms of narratological imperatives such as genre, audience, narrator functions, intertextuality and conditions of production. Legal procedures and regulations are discussed in terms of their influence over individual story production, not as they relate to the continued operation of ‘the law’ itself. Any suggestions reformative of particular laws always proceed from the development of new narratives of subjectivity for the individual women involved in the case studies under examination. In other words, the laws may need changing in order to incorporate new versions of violent female subjects. These same considerations apply in the case of the media. My own background as a media theorist leads me to consider the impact the practicalities of modern journalism have on story production. In many ways, the close relationship between legal and media institutions has meant that the two function together and their representations, in these case studies at least, mostly lend themselves to a single analysis, with dominant media depictions mirroring courtroom portrayals. Due to its aim, this study is necessarily interdisciplinary, traversing mainstream and feminist legal and media theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, semiotics, narratology and communication studies. This approach gives me the requisite room to bring different theories together, to cause discursive clashes, to untangle one theoretical knot with the aid of another from a different discourse, to leap theoretical hurdles in the same way. I approach theory in an instrumentalist manner. Following Foucault’s ‘toolbox’ methodology,5 I gather together those concepts and ideas which are useful at certain times and discard them again once they have served my purpose without much regard for strict observation of disciplinary boundaries. Mine is a rhizomatic approach that rejects the notion that things, people, narratives, discourses can ever be separated from each other into autonomous units. I employ what Kathleen Daly and Lisa Maher call an ‘intellectual double


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shift’ (1998: 1), working across disciplinary boundaries to demonstrate the awesome power of representation to produce real, cultural and personal effects. This technique is not an apologist for lack of rigour. Rather, as Mackenzie Wark has commented, ‘committed scholarship cannot do otherwise’ (1992: 142) than utilize such a multivariate methodology. Mine is a carefully planned journey, then, around the contours of violent female subjectivities, highlighting the historical reverberations in their constitution, the political exigencies at their core. This study foregrounds gender issues, at the expense of others such as race, class or ethnicity. I chose this focus to avoid producing another of the studies which Kerry Carrington notes simply add one essentialism to another following the formula: ‘racism ⫹ sexism = black women = white women only more so’ (1993: 17). My desire not to reduce complicated situations to such a simplistic formula, combined with my inability to adequately deal with these complexities in this study, led me to narrow my focus to include only gender. In order to contain the scope of the study, then, I chose to include case studies of women who are all fairly similar, in the sense that they are all white, Caucasian and middle class. The various narratives of violent female subjectivity are analysed as cultural texts in this study, rather than in terms of their traditional discursive positioning as argument (in legal discourses) or reportage (in media discourses). Hence, these narratives are deliberately taken out of context so that their historicity and their status as cultural artefacts is made evident. They thus assume a more general character than would be the case were they considered only within the strict bounds of the individual discourses within which they were constructed. This approach stresses their importance as examples of constructions of the feminine which are still inherent within Western heteropatriarchy in general. It does not function as a critique of the dominant media, nor as a detailed study of the operation of modern legal discourse. It merely considers these discourses as major contributors to the creation and perpetuation of dominant understandings of what it means to be a woman in a contemporary Western heteropatriarchy. Accordingly, then, in Chapter 1 I employ psychoanalytic concepts of trauma and abjection because they provide useful possible explanations of media and legal hysteria and vilification of violent women, and because they help reveal the general cultural unease which acts of murder provoke. Psychoanalysis is again relied upon in Chapter 5, where Freud’s theorization of the female beating fantasy is efficacious as a narrative frame for Karla Homolka’s and Valmae Beck’s stories of female sadism. Chapter 4, on the other hand, invokes psychoanalytic understandings and literary conceptualizations of vampirism, and media studies investigations and critiques of mainstream media practice, to excavate the meaning of Tracey Wigginton’s murder of Edward Baldock for Australian society. Meanwhile, in Chapter 3, legal formulations of the defences of provocation, diminished responsibility and self-defence are vital to the examination of the media and legal

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narratives told of Mrs R., Erika Kontinnen and Pamela Sainsbury. No one discourse is privileged over any other as a site of ‘truth’; each is used where and when it provides illuminating or interesting insights into the nature of narrative construction and, particularly, into media and legal narratives’ denial of female agency. I am aware that my usage of terms such as ‘women’ and ‘feminism’ can be read as examples of my own desire to universalize and indeed perhaps even to ‘totalize’. However, I use these terms self-reflexively and contingently. At times, in order to make a point politically salient and to avoid the ultimate irrelevance of an excessive relativism, I have found I must speak of the position of ‘women’ in general, at least as that position is delineated within the particular discourses I am discussing. Yet, I am also fully conscious of the exclusionary formation of any such position. In attempting all-encompassing validity, terms like ‘women’ leave out more groups than they include. However, designations like these have cogency for the discourses I analyse. The mainstream legal institution, for instance, has developed a notion of the feminine and of what being a ‘woman’ means, and it is just as important to be able to talk about this construction as it is to recognize that it doesn’t, can’t possibly, represent all ‘women’. I have used umbrella terms like ‘feminism’, ‘feminist legal theory’ and ‘mainstream legal and media discourses’ in order to delineate general tendencies within those discourses rather than to homogenize many different strands of thinking into one convenient label. A huge diversity of theoretical perspectives are included in these overarching designations, as are a disparate variety of their engagements and interventions with each other. Yet within such diversity, there are lines of thought, trajectories of theorizing which can be mapped and considered as indicative of the general aims of the discourse itself. The diversity becomes apparent in discussions of individual theorists, the common threads in analyses of discursive traversals. Effectively, I wish to invoke a Derridean ‘double gesture’ as theorized by Judith Butler in her consideration of the efficacious usage of universalizing terms. She states: it is necessary to learn a double movement: to invoke the category and, hence, provisionally to institute an identity and at the same time to open the category as a site of permanent political contest. That the term is questionable does not mean that we ought not to use it, but neither does the necessity to use it mean that we ought not perpetually to interrogate the exclusions by which it proceeds, and to do this precisely in order to learn how to live the contingency of the political signifier in a culture of democratic contestation. (1993: 222) I focus specifically on human agency in my attempts to uncover which constructions of the feminine have present currency in portrayals of violent


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female subjectivity. My hypothesis is that female actions, violent and nonviolent, may be read as intentional and legitimate responses to personal and structural forces, and thereby cast light on damaging and limiting structures and discourses. My general finding, however, is that female agency is read in the discourses under study as intrinsically good or evil, which thereby maintains such damaging structures. My theoretical ‘double gesture’, then, in analysing portrayals of female agency means that I must use totalizing sounding language to allow for a reading of all female murderers as potentially autonomous agents, even as I am aware that this language excludes the possibility of other readings which might stress female killers’ victimization, circumstances or structural inequities. Although such factors are undeniably important in considerations of motive and agency, my aim is an expressly political one designed to challenge depictions of partial or non-existent female agency with a possible picture of autonomy, albeit contextualized, in order to provoke different understandings of female violence and agency from those currently relied upon in the discourses under study. Hence, as I will argue in more detail shortly, all representations of female killers warrant consideration. For regardless of the ethics of individual women’s behaviour, portrayals of their acts have enormous influence over cultural conceptions of the feminine and female agency. Cases where women are accused of acts considered wicked and inhuman, for instance, have a vital role in maintaining notions of feminine evil, just as those where women are portrayed as victims have importance in preserving ideas of female oppression.

Narrated and performed subjects My version of subject constitution, to be developed more fully in the next chapter, derives from Seyla Benhabib’s (1992) work on the narrated self in Situating the Self and Judith Butler’s on the performative subject in Bodies That Matter (1993). I argue that the narratives one tells and those told about one are integral factors in the production of subjectivity. Each narrative is discursively positioned and is constructed through the constraints and enablements of the discourse in which it is located. Discourses enact only a limited number of narratives of subjectivity and disallow others. They also produce standard narratives or stock stories of subjectivity which act as constitutive models for individual narratives of subjectivity and which make demands upon any individual who comes in contact with the discourse. In other words, discourses establish performatives, narratives of subjectivity translated into codes of behaviour learnt and maintained through reiteration. Individuals have multiple subjectivities, in multiple discourses, telling multiple tales of the self, conforming to or rebelling against multiple performatives. The subjectivities of the women killers who make up the case studies in this book form a mosaic of selves rather than a unified self, existing across several discourses, constituting many narratives. They are still, undoubtedly, ‘real women’, but they exist as well as discursive subjects. The feminist

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criminologists Kathleen Daly and Lisa Maher have observed that, on the one hand, ‘real women’ cannot be analysed in isolation from the discourses through which they are constructed and construct themselves, while, on the other, any analysis of the discursive positionings of ‘real women’ must never assume that these sum up or even reflect the women’s actual identities and lives (1998: 4). So, just as a ‘real woman’ cannot be reduced to a discursive subject, neither can she be analysed outside discourse. Case studies of women who kill are particularly useful for demonstrating subject formation within discourse. The overwhelming nature of their crimes makes especially clear that no one discourse can ever entirely encompass any individual’s range of subject positions, that part of the individual will always remain unnarrativizeable within any one discourse. These cases show the limits of the discourses analysed here because in their abjection they constantly challenge discourses such as law and media to find new methods of representation, new ways of seeing, new possibilities for thought. This brings me to my usage of the crucial terms ‘narrative’ and ‘discourse’. Narratives are an existentially and critically useful mode of understanding our selves and our world. Narratives allow us to constitute experience and construct subjectivities. Their historicity determines their formation and content; changing cultural beliefs influence their interpretation and social use. Furthermore, narratives portray the passing of time, showing the interrelationship of events, ideas and subjects by concentrating on their movement through time. So narratives provide an important framework for the organization of disparate experience into relatively coherent structures which often invoke cause and effect metaphors for explanatory purposes. Narratives exist within discourse and correspond with specific genres. Discourses are produced by institutions and allow for their operation. The primary function of discourse is to determine social roles, in particular the addressers and addressees of discursive texts. This means, as Michel Foucault has argued, that discourse is intimately related to power, is in fact a form of power in itself, producing that which he has termed ‘power/knowledge’ (1976: 94). Discourse is knowledge, providing the necessary structures through which we can know anything. Genre works with discourse, both enacting it and being enacted by it. The term is used in an expanded sense here to encompass the representational formulae extant in social institutions. Legal discourse, for instance, is broken up into various genres which correspond to different purposes and intended audiences. ‘Genre’ is thus the particular mode available within a particular discourse for communicating a particular narrative. Narratives are constrained by the genres in use within the discourse of the institution from which they emanate, and by the discursive orientation of the participants. So a narrative located in mainstream legal discourse will position the addresser (for instance, the defence lawyer) in a particular relationship with the addressee (the jury) and will use certain


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language and narrative structure which suits the genre of legal storytelling. Such tales will conform to the rules of evidence which determine how information can be elicited, who can elicit this information, and what sort of information will be forthcoming. These narratives do not purport to ‘tell the whole story’, rather their discursive location (i.e. in a courtroom) and generic constraints (e.g. the rules of evidence) constitute the subjectivities of those involved in the narrative. In mediating subject relations and positions, these narratives of subjectivity, then, combine description with context and evaluation. The narrative structure of these legal narrations of subjectivity most often follows that of conventional stock stories, which present stereotypical or mythic characters who embody traits evaluated as either ideal or condemnable, positive or negative. Such stories are usually familiar to those receiving them as they are culturally based, and are therefore vital to understanding because they provide easily identifiable and acceptable evaluations of both character and behaviour. In essence, they represent the cultural capital on which discourses rely for community acceptance and comprehension. These stock stories may be specific to a particular discourse, but most frequently they exist transdiscursively, extant within the cultural unconscious. The use of these stories points to the influence of an imaginary realm, an unconscious aspect structuring the development of narratives and discourses. In the case of legal discourse, the legal imaginary maps negative judgements on to particular subject positions, and merely naming female defendants in certain ways can elicit negative verdicts from juries. For example, serial killer Aileen Wuornos, as will be discussed further in the following chapter, was narrated using the transdiscursive cultural fantasy of evil whore and callous thief by the prosecution, who then had little trouble convincing the jury that the murders she committed were merciless and premeditated. For her guilt was implicit in the stereotypical prosecution narrative, as were traditional social evaluations of prostitution and female poverty. Psychical formations, like the fantasy of woman as whore, can be demonstrated, then, to exist in dialogue with the sociohistorical realm and to have real, material effects. Indeed, as Teresa Brennan has argued, it is not clear whether such fantasies would merely fade away if they were not so closely tied to concrete material relations which are used to disempower women (cited in McNay, 2000: 125). Narratives, nevertheless, are not simply imposed upon individuals. Rather, in order to gain understanding of their selves and their lives and to communicate that understanding to others, individuals narrate themselves and are narrated by others as subjects located within certain narratives of particular discourses. Individuals, then, develop multiple stories of self and have many discursive subjectivities. Discourse can be viewed as both a constraining and an enabling force, allowing creation of some subjects yet restricting the birth of others. Subjects, thus, are interpellated through discourse while individuals remain somehow beyond it.

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Throughout this work I make an admittedly problematic distinction between the experiences of ‘real’ or ‘actual’ women, and the narratives of those experiences as they appear in various discourses, such as those of law and media. This distinction between experience and narration is similar to that made by Seyla Benhabib, who argues that people produce ‘life stories’ which stand in for the self, allowing for cohesion between the many subjectivities and narratives produced to represent them (1992: 127). The term ‘life story’ indicates, as Paul Ricoeur argues, that narrative is ‘the fundamental mode through which the grounding of human experience in time is understood’ (cited in McNay, 2000: 85). Humans cannnot articulate their actual temporality, their ‘being in time’, directly but, as Lois McNay explains, must mediate this experience indirectly via narrative. This Ricoeurian understanding of the primacy of narrative in subject constitution allows, then, for a theory of a durable, persistent and stable self which is nevertheless not immutable, retaining the ability to change over time (McNay, 2000: 88). This theory of a narrated self circumvents the idea that authentic experience is somehow ideologically distorted via narrative. For, if narrative is our primary mode of accessing experience, then there can be no ‘raw’ experience at all, no experience which is not unmediated by interpretation, by narrative. Rather, the individual represents her- or himself and is represented by others through discursive positionings and narrations but is not, however, determined by these narrations. Moreover, a distinction between experience and narration allows for the existence of the unnarrativizeable. Not all experience, even of a single event, can be encompassed within any one discourse, and nor can all potential subjectivities. Some experience and subject positions can only be narrated in certain discourses and not in others, and some find articulation difficult anywhere. Complex and conflicting emotions are frequently inexpressible, for instance, as are experiences that have not yet been named, or whose account has not yet been accepted, in any discourse. The impact of trauma also often leads to the subject’s inability to construct narratives of the event, or, in the case of societal trauma, to resolve the event into one acceptable narrative. Narrative structure changes how we perceive experience and can even affect what is perceptible. Subjects and events are constituted through narrative; rather than merely mediating experience, narratives actively reproduce it. Furthermore, the storyteller’s ability to use narrative, their levels of literacy, education and creativity, will all determine how experience is narrated, communicated and understood. Needless to say, traumatic events, such as murders committed by women, are never narrated only once. Indeed, the need to repetitively narrate such events is their defining feature as traumatic. The trauma resides in the structure of the experience of the event, rather than in the event itself, causing an inability to assimilate or understand the event, yet condemning the traumatized society to repeat it over and over via narrative representation. As


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Judith Butler observes in Excitable Speech, this means that the traumatic event both ‘defies and propagates representation at once’ (1997: 36), simultaneously consummately overnarrated and entirely beyond our ken. Alison Young writes that this experience of trauma is intensified in society’s reaction to crime: ‘the subject [or society] experiences the event of crime as a wound; a wound that must be touched, picked at, shuddered over’ and eventually sutured back together, even though ‘the suture will never hold the wound together; and the subject will never leave the wound alone’ (1996: 22). Interpretation of traumatic events is necessarily partial, then, as it is impossible to fix a single meaning to any occurrence, especially in the presence of so many hysterically repetitive explanations.

Narrative and legal discourse Storytelling is vital in court, allowing lawyers to present arguments and to attempt to persuade juries. Narratives are also used to represent defendants and plaintiffs, and often these stories form the only public knowledge available regarding those involved in courtroom proceedings. In criminal cases, these stories can sometimes mean the difference between life and death for the defendant involved, and in all cases the difference between freedom and imprisonment. The importance of narrative in legal discourse was not generally acknowledged in courtrooms when the social scientists W. Lance Bennett and Martha S. Feldman published their pioneering study Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom in 1981. Instead, courts were viewed by both legal professionals and the dominant media as ‘simple forums for presenting the objective facts in a case’ (Bennett and Feldman, 1981: 177). To a certain extent, this idea still persists in practice, if not in theory, as later studies of legal narratives by legal theorists Bernard Jackson and David Ray Papke indicate. Objectivity and neutrality remain the key watchwords associated with mainstream legal discourse, even if the activities of certain members of the institution (such as the police and the judiciary) call such values into question. This situation occurs largely because of what Bernard Jackson terms ‘co-referentiality’ (1988: 132). He asserts that all legal discourse simultaneously invokes arguments and individual laws appropriate to the legal task at hand, and makes reference to a timeless, contextless entity existing outside of itself, namely ‘the Law’, which embodies ideals such as objectivity and neutrality. This entity is not questioned, according to Jackson, either by the legal and lay participants in the cases or by the dominant media. The application of particular laws in individual cases may be challenged, but the notion of ‘the Law’s’ authority is not. One of the reasons ‘the Law’s’ authority has been historically so protected stems from what Terry Threadgold denotes as its ‘mythical goal of truth … and universal justice’ (1994: 324). Regardless of postmodern deconstructions of such totalizing notions as ‘truth’, this remains an aim to which

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contemporary legal writers still aspire. For instance, David Paciocco, in his recent book on the Canadian criminal justice system, Getting Away with Murder, called for courts to place ‘a higher premium on discovering the truth’ (1999: 14). Although Paciocco, citing Alan Dershowitz, believes there are several truths to be found in any trial (1999: 137), he nevertheless falls back on the dominant discourse of ‘the Law’ as fair, neutral and truth seeking in order to justify his demands for legal reform. Co-referentiality preserves the societal importance of the institution, then, without acknowledging the methods by which it proceeds. A single case encompasses several tales. The most influential of these, at least with regard to the verdict, are those presented by the defence and the prosecution. These stories rely on quite different narrative strategies. Bennett and Feldman’s study shows that the prosecution must produce an internally consistent interpretation for the defendant’s behaviour which satisfies the standards of reasonable doubt. This means that the structural story elements – scene, act, agent, agency, purpose – must support the same meaning for the defendant’s behaviour (Bennett and Feldman, 1981: 94). The defence, on the other hand, is faced with three possible strategies. The challenge strategy attempts to show that the prosecution’s story is not internally consistent, that there are missing elements not accounted for, or ambiguities. The redefinition strategy attempts to show that changes in the meaning of certain elements in the prosecution’s story are possible when a different interpretation is placed on them. The reconstruction strategy involves the defence presenting an entirely different, internally consistent story of their own (Bennett and Feldman, 1981: 94). In the end, though, it is the fit of the story into the logical, normative and aesthetic categories extant in the society that ultimately determines its credibility, and the verdict of the jury (Bennett and Feldman, 1981: 114). These strategic narrative options reveal that criminal cases do not generally begin with self-evident characteristics which, along with equally self-evident legal concerns, determine the negotiation and trial process. Rather, as lawyer Douglas Maynard states, ‘they are “talked into being” by way of narrative and narrative structure’ (1991: 129). Criminal cases can be characterized, then, as ‘regulated storytelling contest[s]’ (Goodpaster, cited in Naffine, 1990: 74). Persuasion is the art of the courtroom advocate; both prosecution and defence counsels must attempt to tell credible stories to the jury in the full knowledge that the most convincing of these will engineer the final judgement. Legal narratives, like other discursive narratives, are founded on stock stories. These tales depend on culturally specific stock formats and stock characters in their promotion of stock theories of crime. Juries require the format and structure of such stories to enable them to make sense of diverse information and frequently complicated legal manoeuvres, and they are encouraged to view cases as narratives by legal counsel. Indeed, this may well be the best method for jurors, especially those without legal knowl-


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edge, to comprehend the choice and order of witnesses, the questions asked by and the actions of the lawyers, and to distinguish between important and less relevant aspects of trials. Furthermore, storytelling based on stock narratives provides jurors with a common basis for interpretation because of their familiarity with the various narratives already in circulation in the society in which they live. The use of these narratives has dangers as well as advantages. Legal theorist Richard Delgardo points out that such narrative habits shape what and how we see, and often screen out other versions of the world (1991: 292). When women kill, alternative visions of reality have the potential to be instrumental in changing representations from negative to positive, altering legal treatment in the process. However, as Regina Graycar writes (1995: 280–1): ‘There are enormous obstacles to women’s stories occupying the same space and having the same authority as the stock stories that underpin the common sense of deeply gendered legal discourse.’ Historically this lack of investigation of and interest in these alternatives has resulted in harsh penalties for many women convicted of murder. Aside from their reliance on stock stories, judges often tell jurors to use their ‘common sense’ when making judgements. The social scientists Berger and Luckman define common sense as the unquestioned, taken-for-granted reality which all ‘right-minded’ persons share. Not to take part in this communal meaning making is to be outside of social reality, perhaps even to be ‘nonsensical’. Judges who counsel jurors to use their ‘common sense’ explicitly position them as ‘right-minded’ persons who uphold the hegemony of the legal system and Western heteropatriarchy. Implicitly, such advice tells them to continue to support the hegemony if they do so already, and to make certain they subscribe to such a version of reality, at least while they attempt to reach a verdict, even if they normally do not. It is thus not difficult for bias to enter the supposedly ‘objective’ world of the court. Defendants who do not subscribe to the legal version of ‘common sense’ may be found guilty simply because their experiences and communication styles differ from those which are upheld in the court and referred to in jurors’ decision making (Bennett and Feldman, 1981: 179). The criminal trials of women who kill are caught up in these twin factors of stock stories and common sense. Such trials represent a rare chance for jurors to publicly judge standard narratives of women as they are presented via legal discourse. In a way these members of the public are asked to evaluate the cultural capital on which shared meaning making is based. However, the selection of narratives from which to choose is severely limited. Frequently juries must decide between supporting the often hysterical presentation of the prosecution counsel, who may claim that the woman on trial killed for no other reason than her own evil nature, and a lengthy, complex and possibly more ambiguous defence tale which could rely on expert evidence relating to mental illness, societal structural inequality or possibly even innocence. Furthermore, these lay members of the public are

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counselled to use only their common sense as a guide, the framework for which lies in heteropatriarchal capitalism. Communicated through the dominant media, such ‘common sense’ usually vilifies the very woman whose actions jurors are asked to evaluate. Headlines appearing throughout trials such as ‘Mankiller hunted for sport’ and ‘Killer was devil’s wife with power to control minds’, followed by descriptions of women who kill as ‘deadly rattlesnake[s]’, ‘black widow[s]’, ‘high priestess[es] of Satan’, ‘beasts’, ‘monsters’, ‘cold blooded, sadistic killer[s]’, ‘lesbian vampire[s]’ and ‘Iron ladies’, leave no doubt as to the dominant hegemonic viewpoint. It is more surprising, then, when a jury goes against this tide of public hatred and condemnation, and acquits such women, than when they convict. Evaluation of the very tale which enables understanding and provides a model for judgement is an unenviable and difficult task for jurors already engaged in sifting through masses of evidence and bearing sole responsibility for the fate of another human being.

Media narratives Narrative is a staple of the news media.6 Every item in a television or radio news broadcast or a newspaper is termed a ‘story’. Events are constructed or at times reconstructed using narrational techniques. Protagonists and characters are subjectified via the principles of storytelling. Even newsworthiness factors, such as dramatization, personalization, continuity and consonance, are elements of narrative construction. Fictional strategies, like metaphor and narrative closure, are likewise employed in news stories to give events shape and purpose, to constitute ‘meaningful’ experience. Nevertheless, journalists, like lawyers, have usually preferred to underplay the vital role of narrative in their production of the ‘news’. In his study of the news media, Fishman described the journalist’s working ideology in terms of these assumptions: ‘that events are self-evident; exist independently of their knowers; are not created, altered, or otherwise affected by the process of discovery; and occur, logically and temporally before the event [sic] is detected’ (cited in Ericson et al. 1987: 101). Journalists’ belief in their simple reality-reflecting role is also evident in the tendency towards packjournalism, where one journalist narrates an event and journalists in a variety of other media merely reproduce this initial story without making any attempt to view the event or ‘facts’ in a different way. While this situation may arise in connection with stringent deadlines and consequent lack of time for originality, media researchers Ericson, Baranek and Chan point out that it also demonstrates the journalistic notion that any event has only one possible story and the first story told simply presents facts without interpretation (1991: 45). In contrast to the beliefs of media practitioners, media theorists have concluded that the media constructs the real rather than simply reflects it (Cohen and Young, 1973; Naylor, 1990; Grabosky and Wilson, 1989;


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Ericson et al., 1987, 1991). Ericson, Baranek and Chan, for instance, characterize the ‘news’ as ‘not a veridical account of reality, but a social and cultural construction of journalists and their sources’ (1987: 346). Thus, news stories, like other narratives, are products of the cultural and social organization of the institution in which they are situated. Like legal narratives, they too are reliant on stock stories for their foundation as mainstream media discourse relies, perhaps more so than any other discourse, on a reservoir of shared understanding for comprehension and continued popularity. Major circulation figures attest to these media’s ability to produce stories capable of relatively easy apprehension and evaluation. The media’s dependence on stock tales remains problematic, especially when combined with standard methods of presentation. The concept of the ‘news story’ is rigidly upheld, with conventions of story structure, writing style and presentation of ‘facts’ enforced. This strict organization can mean that constructions of events and subjects are limited. As Stanley Cohen notes in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, alternative explanations of behaviour deemed deviant under the ruling hegemony are almost non-existent (1987: 177–8). Alternatives are limited largely because of the journalist’s particular narrativization of events. Ericson, Baranek and Chan contend that once the ‘frame’ for the story is achieved, which often requires substantial hard work in itself, the journalist is then reluctant to change it by incorporating information which does not seem to fit the chosen picture (1987: 293). This frame often equates with a stock story, which confers narrative structure and evaluation on the disparate, at times apparently irreconcilable, elements of the event or subject under narration. For example, the initial media narrative of Tracey Wigginton’s murder of Edward Baldock, as will be discussed in Chapter 4, was based on a stock story of vampirism, and journalists adhered to this frame even in the face of information later in the case which suggested an alternative narrative of mental illness and childhood abuse. The imposition of a stock story, then, is instrumental in creating the ‘media event’, characterized as the construction of experience, rather than its more straightforward mediation, for the mass media audience. One of the most common stock narratives used in crime reporting is the morality play which places the forces of good (exemplified by the police or judiciary or lawyers) on one side and the forces of evil (exemplified by the criminal and frequently also by his or her unfortunate family) on the other. As the object of morality plays is for good to overcome evil, the resolution of the tale is usually a given. This reduction of often complicated stories of criminal activity into easily understood and easily judged tales is usually considered necessary on two counts. Time and space limits are claimed to be responsible for the need for simplification, while the narrative structure functions to decrease the threat the criminal poses to society. This last is profound and relates more to a communal notion of ‘law and order’ than to the transgression of individual laws and the harming of individual people. The enormity of this menace has been noted by Jacques Derrida: ‘At its

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most fundamental level, European law tends to prohibit individual violence and to condemn it not because it poses a threat to this or that law but because it threatens the juridical order itself’ (1992: 53). Violence implies chaos demonstrated in the inability of the society to keep control of its citizenry. It is up to the media, then, to maintain an illusion of control and order by casting violent criminal events as morality plays where the outcome is always assured and dominant hegemony always reinstated. Criminologists Peter Grabosky and Paul Wilson observe in Journalism and Justice: How Crime is Reported that this sort of crime story has the primary purpose of ‘reaffirming the basic moral standards of society’ (1989: 12), demonstrating both the might and the rightness of institutional authority. This morality play structure is particularly evident in reports of murder cases. The murderer is frequently portrayed using stock narratives arising from popular stories or myths, such as Dracula, Bluebeard, Lady Macbeth or Medea, which allow for an easy mapping of this narrative structure on to the contemporary event of the killing. With the protagonist placed firmly on the side of evil, any serious issues or questions arising from the event, which may have consequences for society in general, tend to be buried under a tide of sensationalism and hysteria. Murderers considered to have performed especially dastardly acts are transformed into monsters in these accounts, and are thus disconnected from their societies and from the human race in general. This resolute distancing allows for the denial of any suggestion of societal culpability or responsibility for such deeds. The media responses to women who kill are even more exaggerated than they are for men. Feminist legal theorist Bronwyn Naylor describes these differences succinctly: ‘Whilst male deviance is seen to exist on a continuum, female deviance is polarised: madonna/whore, the gentler sex or the more deadly species: Snow White/the Wicked Queen’ (1990: 5). This means that male violence or deviance is viewed in Western societies in terms of degrees, while women are seen to be either good or bad with no possibility of existing in between these two equally improbable polar opposites. Jane Caputi observes in The Age of Sex Crime that this results in the reinforcement of the mostly latent character of ‘real’ female violence: what is genuinely forbidden or taboo (e.g. women defending male attacks regularly and with great force and style, female bonding etc.) does remain socially unspoken, tacitly censored in the imagineered mass media in order to ensure that it will remain unimaginable and hence, largely unactualised. (1988: 88, emphasis in original) Male violence, on the other hand, is completely actualized! As Naylor has observed, representations of violence in men exist on a continuum for all male behaviour ranging from the non-violent through to the murderous and


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sexually bizarre. Violence is viewed as one of many possible behaviour patterns for men; it is not strikingly unusual even when extreme. This means that when a man kills he can expect that his crime will be both imaginable and possibly even seen as human. Indeed, male crime in all forums, from the fictional to the factual, is frequently articulated, debated, portrayed, glorified, even fantasized. Female killers gain humanity under only one circumstance – when they can be represented as politically neutered victims. If a woman kills her male partner, for example, and can demonstrate his extreme abuse of her, then she might win the right not to be viewed as an active participant in defence of her self, but as her partner’s victim. This means that her partner must take responsibility for her acts of violence as well as his own; in other words, he is considered culpable for his own murder. This is not to suggest that the acts of the man do not precipitate violence in the woman, only that such a representation denies her agency. Having at last taken some action to defend herself against her attacker and having succeeded in overcoming him, the battered woman is immediately cast as not having acted at all. She effectively loses the very agency and self-determination she tried so hard to gain. If female killers do not correspond to the limitations of this stereotype, they are placed in the opposite and equally non-agentic category of the inhuman monster. These stock narratives of women who kill have very far-reaching effects. They can adversely affect the legal treatment of the individual female offenders themselves and can militate against their receiving any sort of rational justice. However, the effect of these tales is even more disturbing and pernicious than this. These stories affect the representation of women in general and the meaning of the feminine because they deny female agency and a concept of women as active, human subjects. One of the main reasons for the use of stock narratives and narrative structures relates to the capitalist imperative under which the dominant media labours. Sensationalist horror stories sell newspapers and increase ratings on television and radio programmes. Journalists are trained to look for the horror story in the crime. Grabosky and Wilson found journalists were more interested in the ‘juicy bits’, the gore and violence, in criminal trials, than they were in esoteric considerations such as legal strategies and argument. They explain thus: [T]he coverage of detailed and arcane legal proceedings is labor [sic] intensive, and media organizations devote few resources to reporting them. Too often, unfortunately, court reporters are not trained to do their task. They show disinterest in any legal problems that develop in the course of a trial and, as with crime news generally, look for the dramatic and entertaining rather than the politically and socially important features of a trial. (1989: 131)

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Emphasis on the dramatic and the entertaining extends to the selection of which criminal trials are covered. Those involving physical aggression and murder are highly preferable; however, not all violence or death is deemed equally newsworthy. Instead, according to Grabosky and Wilson’s study, editors choose stories that will outrage their readers or which heighten a sense of menace and threat. In particular, they concentrate on violent events which happen to those whom they term ‘the right sort of people’. These people are ‘respectable citizens, children and the elderly’, especially those merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those from more marginal groups receive less coverage (Grabosky and Wilson, 1989: 13). These preferences for particular sorts of victims don’t necessarily extend to perpetrators. Indeed, killers from marginalized groups slaying members of the mainstream make for some journalists’ idea of news heaven. One cited by Paul Wilson claimed (1988: 55): ‘If I could get a story of a beautiful lesbian who mows down children at a kindergarten with a machine gun I would be over the moon.’ In selecting news stories on the basis of the ‘type’ of people involved, Grabosky and Wilson point out that the news media tend to reflect and reinforce, rather than challenge, the prejudices – classism, racism, sexism, heterosexism – existing in society generally (1989: 14). Reporters also admit to over-dramatizing some events, or engaging in ‘beat ups’, thereby transforming the prosaic into the fascinating. A favourite technique of effecting this involves the indiscriminate use of hyperbolic terms such as ‘trauma’ and ‘tragedy’. As Grabosky and Wilson note, these overstatements ‘may not result in the most accurate description of what in fact occurred, but they do make the copy more readable’ (1989: 19). The news story is, thus, ‘talked into being’ in a similar manner to the legal narrative. The construction differs, however, in that news stories have fewer content restrictions and journalists are less hampered by regulations insisting that all evidence be duly aired than are their legal counterparts. Legal stories may attempt some creative dodging of the rules of evidence in criminal trials, but they can never entirely evade them. News stories have no such pressures. The dominant media’s persistent use of morality-play narrative structures and stock stories allows them to assert an essentially normalizing, quasi-religious influence on society. Jane Caputi explains that: ‘Like traditional religions, the mass media provides those repetitious pictures and stories which ritually demonstrate the basic order of the culture’ (1988: 159). Media researchers generally agree that the news media are enormously influential in creating people’s perceptions of right and wrong, deviance and justice (Cohen, 1987; Naylor, 1990; Wilson, 1988; Grabosky and Wilson, 1989; Ericson et al., 1987, 1991). Crime stories are the staple diet of newspapers, news and current affairs programmes, and innumerable movies and television series, informing the society that consumes them about the moral boundaries of that society, and about ‘the shapes the devil can assume’ (Cohen, 1987: 17). Moreover, the media are responsible for both adding to


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and confirming the cultural capital, namely ‘common sense’, of their originating society. In essence, they provide a ‘daily barometer of hegemonic processes’ (Ericson et al., 1991: 12) for their enormous audiences. In presenting crime stories, the dominant media have a symbiotic relationship with the mainstream legal institution. This alliance is evident firstly in journalists’ relationship with the police. Uneasy as this association is, the media’s dependence upon police sources for leads on new stories and for information on existing ones remains. Although both sides complain about the activities of the other, the police nevertheless continue to perform a gatekeeping function in respect to crime news. Frequently, police reports of violent crime are reprinted uncritically and without any further sourcing. Even crime stories which do consider information from others involved in the cases tend to reflect the police perspective (Grabosky and Wilson, 1989: 29). The police interpretation of such events, then, is treated as neutral and objective, with no acknowledgement that the police release only those details which are deemed appropriate or which will help them in their investigations. The symbiosis between the two institutions continues as crime stories unfold. Legal narratives of both offender and victim given in court are copied faithfully in the pages of major newspapers, and in television and radio broadcasts. As the case studies to follow will show, reports of criminal trials centre around transcripts of legal rhetoric and evidence given by witnesses without any positioning of such material within the whole trial process. Rarely, for instance, are readers informed that certain witnesses have been called to support particular sides of the legal debate. This omission is especially glaring in the case of expert witnesses, whose evidence is treated as wholly neutral and objective rather than partisan.7 Often, too, witnesses’ answers are reported without the all-important context of the questions. Instead, media crime reports largely consist of page after page of flowery legal verbiage supported by choice phrases from various witnesses. Lacking any form of interpretation or even basic information about criminal trial procedure, such material is allowed to assume an unproblematic ‘truth’ value. The mainstream legal institution and the dominant media may have developed a symbiotic relationship because they share a similar orientation towards crime. According to Ericson, Baranek and Chan, both institutions are oriented towards conflict and specifically towards individual instances of dissent and lawlessness (1991: 8). Furthermore, they are both more interested in conflict as an event than as a general societal malaise, preferring to personalize violent occurrences rather than to consider what both term ‘hypothetical’ investigations of the causes and roots of conflict. This orientation towards events and people produces accounts of crime which mystify the social and historical roots of crime by suggesting that wicked or bothersome individuals are at fault rather than unjust and inequitable social structures. For instance, in the cases of the battered women who kill (see Chapter 3),

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both law and media represented these women’s abusive relationships with their male partners as unusual, and their murders as extraordinary, rather than as the worst results of an institution of marriage which historically and traditionally has enshrined unequal relations between men and women. Paul Wilson points out that the rarity of ‘media portrayals that emphasize structural, economic or other causal models of crime’ (1988: 55) has an important purpose insofar as journalistic sensationalizing of individual instances of crime ‘drives people away from community interaction and rigidifies harsh law and order responses to complex crime questions’ (1988: 55). As in all symbiotic relationships, benefits accrue to both sides. The dominant news media gain the vital aura of objectivity and neutrality by giving weight to the views of legal practitioners and through faithful reproductions of legal discourse. Although some criticism of particular legal officials (such as members of the judiciary or the police force) is ongoing, the legal institution itself is not attacked. The gain for the media in continuing to support ‘the Law’ continues to be far too great for any such thorough-going critique. The legal institution also gains from the continued co-referentiality of ‘the Law’ presented in media reports. According to Ericson, Baranek and Chan, most people don’t have direct exposure to the legal system but learn about it from television and popular culture, which regularly elide the legal institution with ‘the law’ and thus grant it the status of objectivity, neutrality, fairness and pursuit of the ‘truth’ (1991: 17). Regardless of this highly effective symbiosis, however, these mainstream discourses of law and media never remain entirely unchallenged. As the case studies demonstrate, alternative tales are always forthcoming, some of which have profound effects on these dominant discourses, even resulting in their alteration. Nor are these individual tales of cases the only form of confrontation mainstream legal and media discourses face. Other discourses, even from within the same institution, also subject these dominant discourses’ practices and beliefs to scrutiny and critique. One of the most influential of these has come from within the institution of law, namely feminist legal discourse.

Feminist legal narratives and metanarratives Feminist legal theory functions primarily as a metanarrative to mainstream legal theory. In other words, it theorizes about theory, critiquing and examining the theoretical models and constructs used in traditional, mainstream legal theorizing. Much of this work is reformative of particular laws and legal principles. It is also reactive, responding to developments in the discourse of law. Several feminist legal theorists consider that feminist critiques of legal theory and practice fall into three phases. The first phase, beginning in the late 1960s, was empirical feminism, which critiqued traditional theories of criminology and legal theory for either failing to consider women in their discussions of criminal behaviour, or for presenting gender difference only in stereotypical ways. Empirical feminists also conducted


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their own studies of women involved in all aspects of the criminal justice system. The second phase, beginning in the 1980s, was standpoint feminism, which problematized the usage of the term ‘woman’ as a universal category, critiqued traditional discursive models of value-free research and emphasized both the diversity of women’s experience and the discursive constructions of women’s lives. The final, and most recent, phase is that of postmodern feminism, influenced by the work of Foucault and Derrida, which critiques the notions of selfhood and group identity, problematizes the idea of an authentic point of view from which one might speak and the concept of universal grand narratives, and debunks ideas of ‘truth’ and objectivity. (Smart, 1990: 77–83; Naffine: 1997, 95–7; Daly and Maher, 1998: 2–4). These three phases are not developmental phases, as work in all three areas continues currently. Further to its status as metanarrative, feminist legal theory also offers narratives in its own right. It thus operates both as a reactive critic and a proactive opponent of mainstream legal discourse. In this capacity, feminist legal discourse has developed female subject positions which assert women’s humanity through a strong accent on contextualization. Mainstream legal discourse tends to rely on stock narratives of women which lean towards the mythic in line with Western societies’ general dichotomization of women into good girl and bad girl categories. Feminist legal discourse counteracts such depictions by emphasizing the emotional, physical, societal and cultural aspects of female criminals’ lives, in the process forcing recognition of endemic structural inequities acting against women in Western societies, as well as specific personal factors driving women to commit crime. The female criminal is represented, then, not so much as a lone individual, but as a product of her social and cultural milieu. This desire to humanize and contextualize the female criminal has important ramifications for female attainment of full citizenship within Western societies. Feminist legal theorists argue that unless women can be considered to possess full human (as opposed to mythic) agency, responsibility and culpability for their crimes, accompanied by explanations and reasons for their acts, then they continue to lack complete citizenship in their communities (Heidensohn, 1985, 1987; Allen, 1987a, 1998; Wilczynski, 1991; Worrall, 1990; Kennedy, 1993; Chesney-Lind, 1986; Morris, 1987; Naffine, 1987, 1990, 1995, 1997; Roach Anleu, 1991; Daly, 1994; Fitzroy, 1997; Thornton, 1995a, 1995b; Eisenstein, 1988; Young, 1990). These arguments stem from feminist philosophers’ claims that unless women’s powers of reason, rationality and moral thought are judged equivalent to those of the male subject (traditionally granted full humanity), then women lack construction as fully human subjects (Hoagland, 1991; Robb, 1985; Smith, 1985; Cornell, 1991, 1993; Gilligan, 1982; Gatens, 1991; Irigaray, 1985a, 1985b, 1991a; Lloyd, 1986; Okin, 1980; Porter, 1991). Given this background, it is paradoxical that perhaps the most familiar feminist revisionist tale of criminal women is that of the victim. A strong

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tradition of victimology theses operates in feminist theory generally and feminist legal theorists are not exempt from these ideas. Indeed, Kathleen Daly claims that ‘feminist work in crime and justice has focused almost exclusively on women’s legal status and experiences as victims’ (1994: 149). Victimology upholds the traditional feminist beliefs that women are oppressed within heteropatriarchy by sexism, racism, homophobia, physical strength and power differentials between men and women, long-term structural inequalities, and gender-related poverty. Yet victimology not only constructs women as oppressed, but as victimized in their oppression. Moreover, as Hilary Allen notes, victims are never aggressors, never sinners, never responsible; they are always more to be pitied than blamed for their acts (1998: 66). That this is a gendered explanation is made evident when we consider that this link between victimization and criminalization, which leads to women bearing little or no responsibility for their actions, is not available to men (Daly, 1994; Allen, 1987a). This delineation of the victim differs little from her earlier incarnations in mainstream discourses such as law and media. She is more contextualized, placed within a culture, at the mercy of specific societal inequities, and her social world is clearly marked responsible for her predicament, but her actual personality traits are substantially the same. She still suffers, she still endures, she is still resigned to her fate. The radical edge of the feminist project which forced acknowledgement of the systematic oppression of women is thereby blunted in victimology theses. The problems may be relatively new and shocking in terms of world history, but the figure at the heart of the matter is ancient and sadly familiar. The use of the victim stereotype in feminist legal theory has been particularly prevalent in feminist discussions of battered women who kill abusive husbands. As the case studies in Chapter 3 will show, some of the feminist rewritings of these cases simply redeploy old tales for new purposes. One of the prime instances where this occurs is in Lenore Walker’s (1984) theorizations of Battered Woman Syndrome, where, in her attempts to explain the harsh realities of these women’s lives, battered women are effectively pathologized and reduced to non-intentional co-dependants. To be sure, such strategies are occasionally legally efficacious, but they are also naive and culturally dangerous in their continued activation of restrictive and disempowering stereotypes of women. Feminist legal theorists have constructed other subject positions for criminal women than merely that of the victim. These depictions rely upon principles of self-defence and self-preservation which insist upon women’s relative autonomy and ability to make rational decisions even in the face of violence and crisis. However, such portrayals are reasonably rare, especially in the spectrum of feminist imagings of female murderers. In general, as Hilary Allen has also observed, it appears that if women who kill cannot be made to fit the straitjacket of the victim, a pall of feminist silence descends (1998: 66).


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This silence tells a great deal about constructions of violent female subjects within feminist legal theory. First, it suggests that certain violent women are more acceptable for discussion within feminist legal theory than others. Selection depends upon the offender’s personal politics and the type of violence committed. Women whose activities betray a feminist consciousness, or can be used to promote one, find themselves the subjects of further analysis, as do those who have engaged in violent acts as the consequence of previous abuse (the quintessential victims). Although, as Kathleen Daly admits, especially in these latter cases, it is often hard for feminist commentators to even recognize women’s violence in the first place (1994: 131). By contrast, violence against children or young women tends to suffer from a dearth of research, unless it be named infanticide.8 The main impediment, from a cultural studies viewpoint, to feminist consideration of these latter cases seems, ironically, given many feminists’ reclamation of such archetypes, to proceed from mythic roots. Women who kill young women and children, like Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck who form the subjects of Chapter 5, invoke the myth of the monstrous maternal. Even though ‘bad mothers’ such as Kali have been recuperated, to some extent at least, within feminist theory, it would appear that when a similar character emerges in ‘real life’ instances an analogous celebration is not forthcoming. This exclusion may relate to our psychological make-up: early dependence on mother figures makes us especially vulnerable to the fear that an evil mother in human form can elicit. It may also refer only to political exigencies. It is harder to defend or even to gain the necessary detachment to analyse a person who has committed heinous acts of cruelty. In their quest to alter women’s treatment under the law, feminist legal theorists have necessarily used the more ‘deserving’ cases to prove their argument. Women who are judged victims themselves, such as battered women, fulfil these requirements more effectively than those like Homolka and Beck to whose imprisonment no-one objects. Nevertheless, discussion of the representations of these women in mainstream legal and media discourses is very important, demonstrating as they do societal views of women in general. The challenging and critiquing of the stereotypes by which they are portrayed and evaluated is no less important because they are considered more villainous and less sympathetic. The lack of analysis of them in feminist legal theory therefore speaks volumes about the exclusionary formation of the violent female subject in feminist legal theory. Female violence remains intrinsically shocking, even to many feminist legal theorists. Although some studies of women who engage in premeditated and malicious violence have been undertaken (Allen, 1987a; Daly, 1994), these are rarities in the discourse as a whole. Indeed, women’s participation in crime is considered by some feminist legal theorists to remain relatively undertheorized due to the selectivity which founds many studies of criminal women (Daly, 1994; Roach Anleu, 1991). Nor has a thoroughgoing philosophical critique normalizing women’s violence on the spectrum

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of female behaviours, rather than treating it as aberrant, been written. New narratives of women who kill, unreliant on victimology theses, are thus set adrift in the realm of the bizarre and the extraordinary, instead of being located within a comprehensive understanding of what the feminine may mean. This situation requires a swift remedy because an exploration of female violence from a feminist theoretical perspective would allow for more radical accounts of female agency.

Agency and the female subject When a woman murders, the mainstream and feminist legal and media discourses responsible for narrating this event to the public can be read as displaying evidence of trauma. At least two of the primary defence mechanisms, projection and regression, are apparent. The impulse to project on to others impulses and traits that are present in and unacceptable to the self is especially clear in mainstream legal and media discourses. The vilification of women who kill attributes to these women the violence at the heart of both these discourses: it is safer to turn murderesses into monsters than to face the savagery at the core of ‘the law’ and the media. Thus, women who kill function as an example of the Lacanian ‘extimate’. Lynda Hart notes that this term was coined to describe the ‘external intimacy’ when the symbolic order ‘constructs itself as the illusion of a coherent system that nonetheless depends upon disguising the void in its centre by displacing the “lack” onto an element that is posited as “outside” when it is always already necessarily inside’ (1998: 193, emphasis in original). Vilification operates to displace the offender from her society, to insist on her otherness, thereby avoiding the knowledge that she is produced by that society. Vilificatory portrayals are particularly evident in the last three case studies analysed in this book. Here the urge to separate the legal and media ‘selves’ from the activities of ‘lesbian vampire’ Tracey Wigginton, ‘beast of Noosa’ Valmae Beck and ‘killer for love’ Karla Homolka is extreme. Although ‘the law’ is frequently accused of legally sanctioned cruelty and the media is often considered inhuman in its demands for information from and images of people in extremis, both are insistent that women such as these three embody an unusually detestable wickedness which is not found in either the institutions or other citizens of their society. Hence, these women become foci for evil, enacting at one and the same time the human potential for brutality and the possibility of its removal; that is to say, if malignity is concentrated into the persons of women like these, then their banishment may effect its eradication. Regression, on the other hand, expresses the desire to resort to an earlier stage of development in order to escape the fear trauma brings. The apparent need in mainstream and feminist legal and media discourses to return to a period of safety and familiarity is evinced in the use of stock narratives of women who kill which emplot them within common, easily recognized and


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easily judged tales. All three discourses often emplot battered women who kill in narratives emphasizing female victimhood and male oppression. These portrayals repeat traditional and ‘safe’ positionings of male power and female passivity rather than explore the radical and threatening potential for new models of female agency suggested by the woman’s fatal response. Most importantly, these discursive reactions to trauma result in representations of women who kill which deny the human agency of their female protagonists and confirm that female aggression has no place in our culture (Naffine, 1997: 147). The case studies to follow demonstrate that agency is denied through three techniques: vilification or monsterization, mythification and victimism. Vilification/monsterization denies agency by insisting upon the evil nature of the murderess, thus causing her to lose humanity. She is transformed into a monster from outside society threatening the mainstream, rather than one of its members, produced and enabled by her social and cultural milieu. The agency denial which takes place in this technique is specifically that of human agency. The murderess is considered to have acted, but not as a human woman. Mythification works in a very similar fashion. Indeed, these strategies often function together in a pattern beginning with vilification/monsterization and progressing to mythification. This technique relates many women who kill to the most frightening of mythic characters, such as Medea or the evil witch, who are designed to increase fear and elicit harsh responses from the lay community as well as from the legal institution. Once again, this strategy is very effective in distancing the female offender from her society. In this case, however, she is not just monsterized but transformed into the living embodiment of mythic evil through her relation to figures traditionally interpreted in this way. Her agency becomes that of a character from a familiar stock story rather than that of a contemporary woman. Finally, victimism denies agency through invoking victimology theses which insist on the powerlessness of the oppressed. Many portrayals of women who kill depict them as so profoundly victimized that it is difficult to regard them as ever having engaged in an intentional act in their lives. This is the crux of victimology: in emphasizing victimhood, intentionality or agency is neglected. Representations of the murderess as victim, then, function to deny her responsibility, culpability, agency, and often her rationality as well, in their bid to explain her behaviour and secure her sympathetic legal treatment. While undeniably often successful in securing reduced sentences, the disadvantages of such a strategy outweigh the benefits in terms of improving general societal attitudes to, and challenging negative myths and stereotypes of, women. Mainstream legal and media discourses’ denial of female agency in crimes of violence reinforces the notion that female violence is unreal. Feminist rewritings of Freudian psychoanalytic theory argue that this denial is necessary because men suffer intense dread and fear of women.9 These male fears are important for analysis here because men still largely control the mainstream

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legal and media institutions under study. The anxieties are considered to spring from metaphorical fears of castration developed during the duration of Oedipus complex,10 and from men’s enormous discomfort with their early dependence on the mother for survival. These fears are repeatedly expressed in the preponderance of evil female characters in myth and legend. H. R. Hays describes the unifying traits of these various figures in his comprehensive study The Dangerous Sex: The Myth of Feminine Evil: Although there is no unified line of development, there appears to be a connection between the primitive idea of the female black magician, the Babylonian Hebrew Lilith, the Greek Empusa, and Lamia, the vampire and eventually the succubus of medieval theology. What unites them is their power to destroy men, either by magically undermining their vitality or by sucking their blood. (1966: 141) Male fear of women is perpetuated, according to Hays, because of men’s tendency to justify and rationalize it. Their antagonisms are projected on to women ‘in terms of derogatory attitudes by insisting that women are evil, inferior and valueless (because different) and hence should be made to obey, be kept in their place, or fulfil some unreal role which neutralizes them and removes them from the sphere of competition’ (1966: 280). Margaret Whitford (1991) argues that production of male myths of the evil feminine is reliant on the continued silence surrounding mothering relations. According to her analysis, fears of female desertion developed in childhood give rise to the creation of mythic female destroyers because of a dearth of communication regarding the years of male dependence on women, and men’s hatred of their vulnerability. Male dread of women also relates to the fear of ‘dissolution – of being swallowed, engulfed, annihilated’ (Theweleit, 1987: xiii). Klaus Theweleit claims in his work on the Freikorpsmen, Male Fantasies, that this fear is even more primitive in origin than the Oedipus complex, existing before the development of the ego, before the clarification of desire. Dorothy Bloch asserts this same hypothesis, stating that children’s fantasies frequently confront the fear of infanticide. According to Bloch, parents are prone to hostile wishes towards their children, but in most cases these wishes are balanced or outweighed by positive feelings. The very existence of these negative desires, however, no matter how well concealed, imbues children with a strong sense of their own vulnerability and of their parents’ power to kill them (1978: 11). The fears which fuel the creation of malevolent female figures do not beset feminist legal theory. Nevertheless, a general trend within feminist legal discourse is to dichotomize violent women into groups suitable for advocacy and those not. This dichotomization leads to an ambiguous attitude to female agency. Hilary Astor explains that, on the one hand, oppressed women, the group most likely to receive feminist consideration,


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are disempowered by connotations of victimhood and their resilience and strength are not contained by the limiting victim stereotype. On the other, concepts of agency fail, in her terms, to really take into account such women’s oppression and struggle (1995: 189). Moreover, as Lee Fitzroy observes, it is not always politically expedient for feminists to acknowledge female agency because women might receive backlash treatment from an increasingly conservative society (1997: 45). This means that even though the understandings of the feminine upon which such denials of agency are predicated may be distasteful to feminist theorists, they nonetheless help perpetuate ‘the logic of denial and exculpation of female crime which many feminist discussions are also engaged in promoting’ (Allen, 1998: 55). While mainstream legal and media discourses are concerned with homogenizing women as a class group, making moral judgements about the women they exclude and delineating some form of ‘acceptable’ femininity, feminist legal discourse inclines to neglect those cases which are difficult to represent in terms of feminist aims and objectives. However, the very difficulties feminism faces might be read as emanating from the transdiscursive cultural fantasy which insists on the mythical possibility of unredeemable evil and wickedness in women. Murderesses who kill young women and children, like Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck, due to their representation as utterly callous and sinful, thus form the excluded, disapproved and disavowed ground on which the acceptable violent female subjects of feminist legal discourse are constructed. Central to this study is the implicit understanding that representations of all female killers are potentially of interest to feminist theorists, especially those working in the fields of law and cultural studies. Recent work in the politics of representation takes a postmodern perspective which insists that representations should be analysed as representations and not as ‘true’ reflections of a unitary, pre-existing self. Yet feminist legal theorists have in general taken an apparently judgemental and moralistic stance on the ethics of individual women’s acts in their exclusion of some cases from discussion, and have thus failed to recognize these neglected cases as sites for particularly damaging portrayals of the feminine. My aim is to demonstrate that delineations of the acceptability of violent female subjects for study ultimately constrains analysis within the boundaries of traditional male psychical fantasies and limits the effectiveness and the relevance of work which observes such strictures. It is important to recognize that representations of all female killers have an impact on understandings of what being a woman means, and that, therefore, all such portrayals are important for study.

Conclusion The chapters that follow detail constructions of violent female subjects in the mainstream discourses of law and media and in feminist legal discourse.

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The next chapter includes a theoretical discussion of the discursive production of subjectivity, concentrating upon the development of the violent female subject in these three discourses. My model of a narrated and performed subjectivity is detailed here and contrasted with those already in existence in the discourses under analysis. The case of lesbian serial killer Aileen Wuornos is invoked throughout this chapter as an exemplar of the processes of subjectivity construction in these discourses, and to demonstrate the efficacy of employing a model of subjectivity such as the one proposed here. In the remaining three chapters, the case studies provide examples of particular constructions of violent female subjects. These cases demonstrate that denial of female agency is endemic within the discourses of mainstream law and media and to some degree also within feminist legal discourse. All five cases also show the recuperative11 possibilities for violent women within these discourses. Rehabilitation12 of the images of murderesses is demonstrated as viable only when their agency is completely denied, either through victimism or through very successful mythification. Indeed, the case studies are arranged so that this recuperative process is portrayed in terms of degrees. The case studies of the battered women in Chapter 3 betray the most aptitude for agency denial and thus for rehabilitation in all three discourses. They can be portrayed as victims, as more sinned against than sinning, and thus their banishment from society need not take effect. The case considered in Chapter 4 is transitional in its confusion on this issue: Tracey Wigginton is generally vilified and ostracized by mainstream legal and media discourses, yet she is allowed some recuperation under feminist legal discourse as a female revenge fantasy. The last of the case studies, covered in Chapter 5, demonstrates no possibilities for recuperation in any of the discourses studied, even though agency is denied. Mainstream legal and media discourses revile these female sadists as unredeemably evil, and feminist legal discourse is remarkably silent regarding them. These latter cases make apparent to a greater degree than the others exclusions evident in constructions of violent female subjects within feminist legal theory. The six cases denaturalize constructions of violent female subjects, especially in the mainstream law and media, and render overt all three discourses’ continued dichotomization of women into ‘good’ girl/‘bad’ girl, acceptable and condemnable categories. Most importantly, these six case studies make apparent the narrative and performative constitution of subjectivity. Each of these cases forms a mosaic of many stories presenting many subjectivities which at times overlap and at others conflict. No singular subject is represented in these case studies, rather a topography of the construction of various subjectivities is mapped. The need for new stock stories of the murderess on which to base individual representations is made apparent through discussion of the six case studies. These new tales must emphasize agency rather than work to deny it,


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and must reinforce the humanity of women who kill even as they condemn their acts where appropriate. Revisionist work of feminist cultural theorists on myths of the feminine is especially important in this regard. So, too, are the new stories of violent women told in the recent work of some feminist legal theorists. Most of this theorizing revolves around providing agentic representations of battered women who kill abusive husbands. Narratives which assert these murders as precipitated by self-defence, and not provocation or Battered Woman Syndrome, form the apex of these contemporary efforts to humanize and make women who kill agentic. Other narratives of violent women proffered in feminist cultural studies are important as well. These often present the murderess as anarchist (Lynda Hart’s reading of Aileen Wuornos) or as iconoclast, forcing the media and law to cope with her outsider status (Deb Verhoeven’s reading of Tracey Wigginton). In either case, her agency is assured. The six cases used in this book show that constructs of violent female subjects found in the three discourses under study are inadequate for representing either the legal and social interests of the murderesses themselves or those of women in general. This is not to suggest that exclusionary subject formations are necessarily positive or negative in themselves, for all subjects are constructed via inclusions and exclusions. Rather, I wish to critique the inadequacies and political exigencies of these particular subject positions from a perspective which emphasizes the impact of representation upon cultural definitions of femininity. Furthermore, these cases progressively push the limits of mainstream legal and media discourses and feminist legal discourse, exposing the bare bones of subject construction, revealing the abject and unlivable world of the female criminal, condemning the persistent denials of female agency. This study is not merely a lament, however, but urgently demands that we find other methods of representation, other stories of female violence, other ways of seeing.

2

Versions of the self Narrating the subjectivities of women who kill

Prologue: ‘no remorse, no apologies’ – Aileen Wuornos’ killings I had lots of guys, maybe ten to twelve a day. I could have killed all of them, but I didn’t want to. I’m really just a nice person. (Aileen Wuornos, cited in Russell, 1992: 318)

Aileen Wuornos, self-confessed killer of seven white, middle-aged men between 30 November 1989 and December 1990, presently awaits execution in a Florida prison. Arrested in January 1991 she was tried for the first killing and sentenced to death exactly a year later. Since then she has pleaded ‘no contest’ to the other murder charges and has accordingly been given six further sentences of execution. According to her trial testimony, she supported herself, and frequently her female lover, by prostitution, working the highways around the Daytona Beach area in Florida. She would pose as a hitchhiker and, upon getting a lift, would offer her services to the driver. During the year in question she shot seven of her clients to death in woodland close to Florida’s Interstate 75, where she had accepted the rides. Aileen Wuornos has claimed throughout the case that all seven shootings were a result of self-defence on her part; the men had attempted to rape her, and in two cases succeeded, and she had fought back. Aileen’s opportunities to tell her own story have been necessarily abbreviated due to her incarceration from the time of her arrest in 1991. However, via her trial testimony, two media interviews and reprinted excerpts of her police interviews, a compelling self-presentation emerges. Here Aileen presents herself as a victim of circumstance, forced to kill the customers who attempted to abuse her. She demonstrates no remorse for her crimes, arguing instead that sexual abuse is an occupational hazard for prostitutes, and that murder was merely her solution to the problem as it presented itself on those seven occasions. Indeed, Aileen claims that her murder of seven customers suggests that she had been restrained rather than excessive, given that during her time as a prostitute she had serviced around 250,000 men.1

Versions of the self

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This presentation clearly bespeaks her own self-valuation in her absolute refusal to be violated and her conviction that the men who attempted to harm her deserved their fates.

Outline and overview In this chapter I intend to deploy the case of Aileen Wuornos as an exemplar through which to investigate constructions of female subjectivity and agency in mainstream and feminist legal and media discourses representing women who kill. Readings of this case make overt a dearth of agentic constructions of female subjectivity. The first section of this chapter maps the unacceptability of violent female agency through portrayals found in traditional legal and media representations of the Wuornos case, which persistently deny her agency through strategies of monsterization and victimism. This latter technique bears testimony to the influence of feminist revisions of legal discourse and in particular to the operation of two important conceptual methods in early feminist theorizing: victimology and feminine difference. The second section of this chapter explores the development of a female legal subject within feminist legal theory. It begins with a discussion of three theorists whose work exemplifies the victimology and feminine difference approaches. Catherine MacKinnon’s writing has been especially influential in developing a concept of the female victim;2 Carol Gilligan is often credited with producing the feminine ‘ethic of care’ thesis; and Robin West demonstrates how these two theories link together to produce explanations of female criminal behaviour which consider elements such as context and oppression, while relying upon a victim stereotype. The section then charts the ways in which these theories have influenced contemporary feminist legal theory, in particular current notions of female legal subjecthood. Accordingly, controversies such as the equality versus difference debate, the revolutionary impact of the concepts of heterogeneity and corporeality on legal theory and practice, the importance of phenomenological symmetry within the justice process, and the urgent need for comparable citizenship between men and women, are all canvassed here in terms of their contribution to female legal subjectification. Postmodern feminist philosophy and cultural theory have proven enormously influential in recent feminist legal theory. The third section of this chapter considers the work of two such theorists, whose ideas have also aided the development of my own model of subjectivity. Judith Butler’s ‘performative’ subjects and Seyla Benhabib’s ‘narrated’ selves are examined and critiqued here as possible alternatives to, or extensions of, the theorizations of subjectivity offered in both mainstream and feminist discourses regarding violent women. This critique then leads to my development of my own model of subjectivity in the final section of this chapter. This version of the subject, which

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is invoked throughout the case studies to follow, combines performativity and narrativity, producing multiple, fluid, discursively enabled subjectivities possessed of context-dependent agency. It relies on a Ricoeurian understanding of narrative identity, which allows for the heterogeneity characteristic of subjects who are nomadic, in Rosi Braidotti’s terms, yet who retain the basic structure necessary for a coherent life story. This variety of subjectivity marks a radical shift from that foundational to traditional legal and media discourses regarding criminal women, which depend upon a unitary, singular, fixed idea of self, and are marked by a desire to deny female agency through rendering it unimaginable or else diabolical. The case of Aileen Wuornos is pivotal in this chapter because in her own retellings of her story she has asserted herself as a competent and responsible moral subject. For in killing to protect herself from harm, Aileen Wuornos effectively reversed the long ideological history of subject/object relations existing in Western societies, which generally positions men as subjects and objectifies women. On each one of seven occasions she instead undeniably cast herself as a subject and her male victims as dispensable objects.

Bad or sad?: the law, the media and Aileen Wuornos Mainstream legal and media portrayals of the Wuornos case are considered in conjunction throughout this chapter due to the symbiotic ties between the two discourses. This symbiosis makes apparent these discourses’ invocation of very similar cultural understandings of events, behaviours and, most importantly, gender. Women who kill are subject to like explanations for their actions, whether depicted by lawyers or journalists. Consequently, versions of female subjectivity and agency are substantially the same in both discourses. Western legal discourse has traditionally employed a particular construction of subjectivity within its practice of criminal law, and this construct persists in contemporary judgement procedures. This version of the subject draws substantively on certain common ideals regarding subjectivity that are found within traditional Western philosophy. In The Man of Reason (1986), Genevieve Lloyd studies theories of the reasonable subject expounded by various Western philosophers dating from Aristotle to Sartre, and argues that, despite variations in individual theorists, a composite picture of the typical subject is built up. The characteristics of this philosophic/legal subject include: independence, rationality, autonomy, separateness from others, freedom, action, responsibility, and the capacity to make choices. The final, and most important, characteristic of this subject is that it is gendered male: subliminally, the message is that men are subjects while women are almost entirely left out of the discussions on subjectivity Lloyd surveys. Elisabeth Porter, in Women and Moral Identity, also asserts that the characteristics of the ‘ideal’ subject equate with those considered intrinsic to male identity. Thus, she states: ‘men are full persons [subjects], women never can be under this gendered arrangement’ (1991: 33).


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Women have not been accorded full subjectivity, according to Lloyd and Porter, because they are seen as deficient in reason. This idea is persistent in Western legal discourse’s constructions of subjectivity, exemplified in particular by the legal concept of the ‘reasonable man’, still in current usage in Canada, Britain and Australia. This entity, defined in Britain until fairly recently as ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ (Kennedy, 1993: 222), is considered the quintessential subject before the law. In her study of the British legal system, barrister Helena Kennedy notes that although broader and contingent descriptions of the ‘reasonable man’ are now in usage, the concept continues to resonate with white, male, Protestant, heterosexism. In legal practice and theory, femaleness is considered only as an addendum to the figure of the ‘reasonable man’. The legal subject is, thus, infused with gendered understandings of subjectivity. Indeed, as Carol Smart has stated, the law is actually a gendering strategy in itself, producing gendered subjectivities to which certain individuals are tied (Smart, 1998: 26).3 Traditional legal discourse has historically neglected the study of female criminality. This disinterest is certainly not due to a lack of works published by feminist critics on this topic.4 These studies have found that women’s criminal behaviour requires special explanation because within contemporary Western legal discourse and practice women criminals are deviant both in terms of the criminal statistics (which confirm women’s low rates of criminal behaviour) and in terms of sociocultural norms and expectations of females. Defence counsels seeking to represent these ‘doubly deviant’ criminals generally resort to the ideological lenses of domesticity, sexuality and pathology, while prosecutors often rely on reductive ‘bad’ labels to explain the acts of criminal women. As Anne Worrall explains: The more serious an offence is perceived to be, the more likely it is that its motivation will be accounted for in terms of ‘sickness’, provided the nature of the offence remains compatible with the essential ‘nature’ of womanhood. If, however, the crime is perceived to be both serious and ‘unnatural’, its motivation may well be accounted for in terms of inherent wickedness or ‘greed’. (1990: 82) Contemporary legal discourse’s reliance on stereotypes like these to represent female defendants means that women’s crimes are never adequately explained. Feminist legal scholar Ania Wilczynski points out that criminality in women is rarely, if ever, seen as a rational reaction to life stresses, or as a response to social, political or physical inequalities, as is often the case with men (1991: 72). The primary purpose of labelling female criminals either ‘mad’ or ‘bad’ is to deny female agency. Assertions or denials of agency are, of course, imperative in court as the legal understanding of crime depends upon it.

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An offence consists of both a wrongful deed (actus reus) and wrongful intent (mens rea) which, as Hilary Allen reminds us, establish ‘a problematic of human agency’ (1987a: 34), where the most basic requirement of fault turns on the responsibility of the accused for her or his own acts. ‘Mad’ labels rely on the discourse of irrationality, while ‘bad’ labels depend on the language of the mythic and the inhuman to achieve non-agentic representations of murderously active women. Defendants found insane at trial do not receive penal sentences and they are not held accountable for their actions. A defence of insanity, thus, acknowledges the act while removing the agency and responsibility for its commission. Labelling a female killer ‘bad’, on the other hand, suggests that although action took place, the actor was not a human woman but a personification of evil. Understanding of human female criminal agency therefore remains nonexistent. ‘Mad’ or ‘bad’ explanations of female crime are losing potency for some legal practitioners, however, due to the more recent rise of a third strategy to deny female agency. The figure of the ‘passive woman’ now complements the male agent, enshrined in the figure of the ‘reasonable man’, and so ensures his continued utility in legal discourse. Hilary Allen discovered in her study of psychiatrists’ and probation officers’ court reports of women offenders in Britain that this currently fashionable stereotype of passivity operates to recast the woman’s role in the crime as non-agentic, depicting her as having had no idea of what she was doing, or else as forced into criminal behaviour by a male accomplice. Such reports: acknowledge the trajectory of objects in space – the knife in the hand, the thrust of the blade into the heart – but progressively delete from that trajectory all that would mark it as an action by an intentional and culpable subject. (1987b: 83) In this way, the crime is naturalized, according to Allen, recategorized as a natural disaster, even a tragedy. The female offender is portrayed as simply at the mercy of this devastating event and could neither control nor prevent that which ensued (Allen, 1987b: 85). Nor does this denial of agency end with the description of the crime: Allen claims that these reports depict the women as having never engaged in an intentional act in their lives (1987b: 90). Women’s supposed lack of agency when committing the crimes for which they are tried is thus not seen as especially extraordinary within criminal justice discourse. Rather, says Allen, ‘it appears continuous with even the most unremarkable moments of their [the female offender’s] existence’ (1987b: 90). Women, it seems, on the basis of Allen’s findings, are expected by those involved in criminal justice to lack control over their actions and, consequently, to lack responsibility for anything they do throughout their lifetimes.


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This tendency to deny agency is also found in reports on women who kill presented by such noted psychologists as Lenore Walker. In her book Terrifying Love (1990), Walker portrays battered women who kill their spouses as at least partially non-agentic through her allegations that they were amnesic during the murders. This is an interesting conclusion as many male killers also experience amnesia yet are still held accountable for their crimes. Rather than being considered a usual response to the severe trauma of killing another person, then, amnesia in women serves to suggest the killer’s lack of intent. While non-agentic portrayals of female criminals based on their passivity undermine a concept of women in general as fully fledged moral subjects and responsible agents, they are not always necessarily disadvantageous for individual women in terms of sentencing. Hilary Allen notes that women who are presented thus frequently receive little or no penalty. This outcome represents a dilemma for feminist lawyers and legal scholars because it is achieved only at the expense of women’s agency: a woman can reduce her chance of punishment by denying that she acted. The problem is that quite often it is advantageous and, more importantly, accurate to view certain women as victims, as more sinned against than sinning, even when committing a crime. Women who are understood in this way are entitled to short custodial or non-custodial sentences. This kind of representation can also lead to discussions of the individual woman’s personal frailties, family situation and external societal pressures which may have influenced her commission of the crime. These results are worthwhile because they can lead to increased understanding of female crime and to increased justice in sentencing. They tarnish, however, when they are ‘treated as exhaustive of [women’s] condition as social or legal subjects’ (Allen, 1987b: 93). The special problem for women is that mainstream legal discourse uses their pleas of passivity and diminished responsibility to reinforce entrenched stereotypes of femininity, whereas men’s pleas of partially diminished agency are considered aberrant and antithetical to cultural conceptions of active masculinity. Male agency is thereby preserved from challenge while female agency is positioned as in need of constant assertion. The problem for feminist analysis, therefore, is both to accept and to encourage awareness of contextual factors in female crime without also, as Allen warns: following these reports into suppressing the recognition that these women can also – even at the very moment of their victimization and coercion – be conscious, intentional, responsible, and potentially dangerous and culpable subjects of the law. (1987b: 94) Context enables and produces, but does not determine, female crime, and its consideration need not negate female agency and culpability. Recasting the criminal acts of women as tragic accidents is to deny the agency and

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responsibility of women in general and to delay recognition of a female ethical subject within contemporary Western legal discourse. The importance of legal recognition of a female ethical subject cannot be underestimated as legal discourse holds enormous power in Western society. Part of this power is dependent on the Law’s illusory nomination as a unity, whereas it is in reality a discontinuous process. For, on a practical level, the Law is produced via individual judgements in individual courts and is reliant on individual interpretations of laws laid down by statute but understood and enforced via precedent. It is a contradictory, often paradoxical, process, which is defended, nevertheless, on the basis of its claim to a singular purpose, namely the application of the laws of the land. Such claims to unity, according to Carol Smart, mean that the Law sets itself apart from the society which produces it, and so exerts and maintains its power as an omniscient commentator on that society (1989: 4, 11). The Law is immeasurably aided in this process by its adherence to the values of impartiality and neutrality, which assert that the Law favours no one type of person and that it treats all who come before it in the same manner. As we have seen, the Law in actuality has a very specific person in mind in the figure of the supposedly universal ‘reasonable man’ on which it bases both legal interpretation and application. Lawyers and judges affirm the neutrality of Law every time they use precedent to support the outcome of a case; the notion that one might look behind the laws for the values which inform them is foreign to and discouraged within the legal profession. For, as Ngaire Naffine points out, if one never questions the moral and ethical basis on which the laws are made, one can maintain the illusion that they are somehow above and beyond the biases of society generally (1990: 35). The ideal of impartiality fosters this legal positivism, arguing that detachment from the particularities of context which produced the act in the first place offers the only reliable way of assessing its criminal intent. However, as Iris Marion Young notes, such an ideal is impossible, as the contextual features of any action cannot and should not be removed from judgement of that action. Impartiality, in her terms, really serves only to mask the ways in which particular groups claim universality for their personal perspectives and to justify hierarchical decision-making structures (1990: 97). Hence, the real value of ideals like neutrality and impartiality is not, as we are led to believe, that they protect the legally enshrined moral code of any given society, but that they disguise and maintain the power of the legal institution itself and those who run it. The Law’s power is twofold. First, the Law has the power to violently change the course of people’s lives. As Robert Cover has observed, the Law is all about enacting violence on others via the sentencing and confinement process (1986: 1607). Second, the Law engages in defining situations and in disqualifying persons from the right to speak in some instances, and from the right to participate in the community in others (Smart, 1989: 164). This


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means, then, as Pheng Cheah and Elizabeth Grosz, following Cover, point out, that the Law is a ‘world-building activity’ which is a constitutive force in how we understand society and those who people it (1996: 10). Even the way we come to think about social issues, like rape and murder, is refracted via the Law. The Law, then, especially the pronouncements of the judges who interpret and enact it, is extremely important in determining what passes for common sense in the society (Graycar, 1995: 278–9). Hence, it is imperative both that we understand the Law’s power to define and delimit the world we live in, and that we attempt to wrest this power back through redefining or defining anew models of subjectivity which include an agentic and responsible femininity. Collusion and symbiosis: legal and media narratives of Aileen Wuornos5 Comparison of legal and media narratives of the case of Aileen Wuornos makes their symbiosis apparent. Media representations of Wuornos were obviously framed around prosecution counsels’ interpretations and opinions throughout the case. Wuornos’ subjectivity was thus conceived very similarly in both forums. Her case evidences the exclusionary processes by which interpretative frames are developed for criminal women, demonstrating the desire of both law and media to exclude information and interpretations not in alignment with their preferred reading. Narratives which conflicted with that of the media/prosecution, such as Wuornos’ own explanation of her behaviour and those composed by her defence counsel and feminist legal and cultural theorists, were either derided or ignored in popular presentations of the case. Chapter 4 will detail similar legal and media attempts to enforce a particular narrative of female criminality in the Tracey Wigginton case. Media symbiosis with ‘the Law’ does not always demand slavish following of prosecution narratives. Frequently the media will adhere just as closely to the defence portrayal. The defendant’s character and the crime committed are vital factors in determining on which side media partisanship will fall. Media loyalty to the prosecution in the Aileen Wuornos case was predictable given the number of her victims and her outsider status as a prostitute and a lesbian.6 Feminist cultural studies theorist Lynda Hart argues in Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (1994) that Wuornos is a profoundly threatening character to mainstream heteropatriarchy: On the hand that quite expectedly is not the one the media or the courts are playing, Aileen Wuornos’s story is quite banal, an all-too-ordinary repetition in a culture of paranoid male fantasies that eroticize their worst nightmares. This time, however, one might say that the fantasy has crossed a certain boundary. The hallucination has been realized. Aileen Wuornos has, quite horribly, acted it out. If the fantasies worked

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Versions of the self to prevent actualization, something has gone awry; Aileen Wuornos has violated that barrier. (1994: 141)

According to Hart, Aileen Wuornos reverses many of the assumptions by which women are expected to live in Western societies.7 Among the most important of these, in terms of this study, are Aileen Wuornos’ insistence on her own agency and on her right to exercise self-defence. In her first trial she made plain her unshakeable belief in the justifiability of her killings: ‘If it’s very violent and physical, I’m going to defend myself, yes. Everybody has a right to defend themselves. That’s what I did. These were very violent, violent rapes, and the other ones I had to beg for my life’ (cited in Russell, 1992: 425). Hart cites an even more impassioned rationalization from Wuornos’ ‘Dateline’ interview (1994: 143): ‘Here’s a message for the families: You owe me. Your husband raped me violently, Mallory and Carskadden. And the other five tried, and I went through a heck of a fight to win. You owe me, not me owe you.’ Aileen Wuornos contends throughout her case, then, that rights to self-defence should not be dependent on gender or occupation. Indeed, she claims that some careers, like prostitution, entail a more frequent need for self-defence than do other less dangerous professions. In statements such as the one with which she opened her ‘Dateline’ interview: ‘I’m supposed to die because I’m a prostitute. No, I don’t think so’ (cited in Hart, 1994: 142), she implicitly asserts that such rights may, will and should extend to murder where necessary, even when the victims are white, middle-class men, members of Western heteropatriarchy’s most valued class (Hart, 1994: 137, 152). As she stated in the same interview (cited in Hart, 1994: 143): ‘I do not regret it. They were going to kill me. I killed them. That is a normal thing to do.’ Wuornos’ demand for public recognition of the veracity of her choices grew even stronger in Nick Broomfield’s documentary Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, where she insisted: ‘I say it’s the principle, they [the prosecution] say it’s the number. Self-defense is self-defense, I don’t care how many times it is.’ Thus, Aileen Wuornos articulates a subjectivity and a moral code utterly alien to those customarily ascribed to women in legal and media discourses in Western societies. Her lack of regret resounds throughout the case, indicating more forcefully than any other factor her belief that she had a right to act as she did and, more than this, that she should have such a right. The mainstream media, clearly appalled and threatened by Wuornos’ defiance, typically chose to demonize her, along with the prosecution counsel whose brief demanded her discreditation. The prosecution narrative of Aileen Wuornos positioned her as a stereotypical ‘bad’ female criminal. Rejecting her claims of self-defence as ludicrous due to the sheer numbers of her homicides, the prosecution framed their assessment of her crimes around the popular and familiar stock story of the vengeful prostitute stalking inno-


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cent men. According to this retelling, Aileen Wuornos was a ‘callous thief’ who hitched lifts with unsuspecting ‘family’ men, manipulated them into accepting her services as a prostitute, and then finally killed them for their money and cars. The media reinforced and embellished this tale with assertions of Wuornos’ animalism, describing her as a ‘deadly rattlesnake’ who enticed men into her ‘killing zone’ and then ‘basically assasinat[ed] them’ like a ‘predator’ (McLean, 26.1.91). The circumstances surrounding Wuornos’ crimes were dismissed in favour of her shorthand appellation as the ‘world’s first female serial killer’ (Russell, 1992). Although Wuornos hardly fitted the FBI identification criteria for such killers,8 the media nonetheless forced her into this mould in their desperation to cram the diverse aspects of her case into a recognizable, stereotypical story format. Wuornos became an archetypal man-hating lust killer, stalking and murdering men from an overwhelming desire for control and domination. Male provocation as a potential catalyst for her deeds, explicit in her own story, is rendered impossible in this media/prosecution tale. Instead, as Lynda Hart comments, this portrayal, which inserts Aileen Wuornos’ murders into the discourse of the serial killer, thereby casts them as enigmatic and beyond explanation (1994: 137). She no longer threatens because her acts are now irrational and without cause; she no longer challenges because she now has more in common with a celluloid or literary icon than with flesh and blood women who harbour legitimate grievances. The defence, for its part, attempted unsuccessfully to utilize the more recent non-agentic portrayal of the victim, choosing to concentrate on Wuornos’ previous trauma and abuse as explanations for the homicides. They argued that she killed in metaphorical revenge against the men who had raped and beaten her throughout her twenty-year career as a prostitute and her grandfather and brother who had sexually assaulted her as a child. This defence makes a crucial admission that Aileen Wuornos had been raped while working as a prostitute, without supporting her contention that the seven murders resulted from self-defence. Rather, her trauma from her previous maltreatment was used to suggest the unreality of her current allegations of abuse. Like the prosecution/media narrative, this story also denies Aileen Wuornos’ agency, inserting her into the model of the irrational woman unable to control and take responsibility for her impulses due to past trauma. In both defence and prosecution narratives, then, Aileen Wuornos was at the mercy either of inhuman lusts or of previous abuse; at no time did her story of reasonable self-defence receive anything but scant consideration. Aileen Wuornos’ treatment in mainstream legal and media discourses shows that women who kill are portrayed using only very limited narrative models. Even when, as in Wuornos’ case, they are prepared to speak rather than be spoken for, their tales of events are not integrated into public rewritings unless they fit a previously existing story format. Moreover, Wuornos’ case demonstrates that, through their usage of the techniques of

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mythification and victimism, these stock stories all betray a desire to deny female agency. Victim narratives, like that used in Wuornos’ defence, have their roots in feminist legal theory and cultural analysis which has reconceived some criminal women as more oppressed by heteropatriarchy than aggressive in their own right. I wish now, with reference to Aileen Wuornos, to explore three early feminist theories important to the development of this tale of the victim and then to discuss versions of the female subject found in contemporary feminist jurisprudence.

Feminist legal theory and the female subject Feminist legal theory has historically been one of the most fertile grounds within feminism generally for the development of the victimology thesis in relation to women’s societal rights and responsibilities. Indeed, this discourse has helped endow victimology with the popularity and legitimacy it now enjoys in mainstream discourses. It originated within two major strands of feminist theory, referred to here as ‘victimology’ and ‘feminine difference’. The work of Catherine MacKinnon, Carol Gilligan and Robin West is traditionally associated with the beginning of the rise of victimization as an explanation of female behaviour. Catherine MacKinnon explored the ways in which women are victimized and silenced by Western society generally and the legal system in particular. Carol Gilligan was influential in the development of the thesis of feminine difference, arguing that a feminine moral code exists alongside the more pervasive and normalized masculine one, but that it has been ignored in contemporary concepts of morality and justice. Robin West combined MacKinnon’s description of female victimization with Gilligan’s understanding of feminine morality to produce the prevailing idea of the victimized female subject. Contemporary feminist legal theorists have persisted with the aim of making legal and moral philosophy more receptive to difference and the feminine in their quest for a distinctively feminist jurisprudence. This inquiry encompasses a diversity of complementary and competing claims, including the development of a female legal subject, the introduction of concepts like heterogeneity, radical alterity and corporeality into legal discourse, and the urgent need for female citizenship. The victim portrait of the female criminal has, thus, undergone much problematization and complex nuancing since her earliest incarnation. In this section I will attempt to chart feminist legal thinking about legal explanations of the feminine, making evident the foundations for the legally efficacious figure of the female victim, while also engaging with some of the many ways in which this original thesis has been expanded and refocused. I will present each of the early theories as a hypothetical reading of the Aileen Wuornos case to emphasize the impact these ideas have on representations of criminal women and to ground these different concepts of female subjec-


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tivity in the practicalities of an actual case. To avoid unnecessary length I will analyse the later theories together in the same manner at the end of this section. Feminist victimology and feminine difference theories Catherine MacKinnon’s work Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1997) presents a forceful and compelling account of women’s oppression in dominant phallocentric institutions, especially that of law. MacKinnon claims that within these institutions women, defined as those whom men fuck, are utterly unimportant and generally ignored except when they resist, whereupon they are crushed. Indeed, women are so totally subordinate to men that even their femininity is defined through the male gaze of patriarchy: women are only as they have been seen by men.9 Furthermore, women are socialized to desire male dominance, ‘which most emphatically is not in our interest’ (MacKinnon, 1987: 54), primarily because they have lacked the opportunity to construct a world without it and are consequently deprived of any consciousness of feminine difference. Women, according to MacKinnon, are universally objectified, should universally identify this experience as being fucked, and should recognize that due to the all-encompassing oppression of patriarchy the feminine has no other meaning. Under such a totalizing system, actual women10 can have no say; their right to speak is constantly being erased. The only course open for women in MacKinnon’s view of the world is thus to repudiate ‘femininity’ as the shackles of phallocentrism and conquer oppression through embracing autonomous and independent ‘masculinity’. Aileen Wuornos is doubly oppressed under MacKinnon’s version of heteropatriarchy. Her prostitution and history of abuse place her firmly in the category of ‘fuckee’, thoroughly fucked by almost everyone with whom she came in contact. In this reading, her profession reaffirms male dominance every time a transaction between prostitute and client takes place because of the woman’s positioning as a saleable commodity. This emphasizes women’s powerlessness rather than, as Lynda Hart might argue, their attempts to control the terms of their own exchange. Moreover, Aileen Wuornos is silenced as well, unable to articulate her feminine experience without the filter of her own subordination. She can never tell it how it is because she can have no idea what being a woman might mean without the oppression of patriarchy. Her only hope is to do as the media have already claimed she has done, and become effectively a man.11 In contrast to MacKinnon, Carol Gilligan argues for alternative understandings of the world to that proffered by dominant heteropatriarchy, in particular theorizing different concepts of morality. Her study In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982) examines the proposition of developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg that girls have an immature grasp of ethical and legal thought

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which persists into adulthood.12 Boys’ fascination with rules and rule making and their use of rules to solve conflict signalled, for these theorists, their more advanced moral development, while girls’ immaturity was evidenced in their lesser interest in rules and their willingness to make exceptions to them based on the context of the dispute. Gilligan concludes that Kohlberg’s Piagetian approach to the development of ethical thought in girls is flawed because he has used a male standard in judging them. Rather than lacking in this area, Gilligan found that girls develop a morality based on responsibilities, while boys develop a rights-based morality.13 Women’s moral judgements tend to be contextual and ‘oriented towards issues of responsibility and care’ (Gilligan, 1982: 99), not based on absolute or universal principles, nor on abstract rights and rules. Gilligan, as Margaret Urban Walker points out, posits a qualitatively new ethics (1989: 123), which claims ‘that the point of morality is to establish a world in which we remain in relation with one another … [where] caring is taken to be the very foundation of the ethical’ (Houston, 1992: 112). Gilligan is careful not to insist that this variety of morality has any necessary connection with the feminine, or with women. However, she consistently links development of this different moral voice with the voice of femininity, prevaricating between moral voice differences and gender differences without really satisfactorily explaining how the two work together and in what ways they are connected. Aileen Wuornos becomes both cause and effect of a failure to care when interpreted through Gilligan’s theory, embodying the result of total disenfranchisement and lack of connection. Gilligan makes a very clear link between aggression and a sense of uncaring: ‘aggression appears [in women’s perception] … [not] as an unruly impulse that must be contained but rather as a signal of a fracture of connection, the sign of a failure of relationship’ (1982: 43). This theory would contend that Wuornos killed out of care for herself, which overrode her responsibilities to others because she lacked connection with them. However, her case can also prove that women are capable of developing a ‘masculine’ rights-based morality rather than one based on responsibilities. Wuornos herself asserted that she killed because her right to life was threatened; her clients had overstepped the rules of her business arrangement with them, thus ensuring her retaliation. So, although Gilligan’s ethic of care thesis can accommodate Aileen Wuornos’ actions, it fundamentally alters their purpose from defence of inalienable rights to assertion of specific and context-dependent responsibilities. This thesis also muffles Wuornos’ self-professed anger at the violation of her rights. Gilligan’s moral concepts are unable to adequately incorporate female rage, as fury tends to dissolve connectedness rather than foster it.14 Moreover, when care is aligned with connection, care of the self can become problematic, especially when it demands the severance of certain connections or the refusal of some responsibilities to others. Angry women like Aileen Wuornos who care less for others than for themselves thus have an uneasy place within this theory.


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Robin West combines a concept of female victimization with an understanding of feminine difference in her consideration of the influence of women’s subordination and oppression in Western heteropatriarchy on their development of specifically feminine characteristics. In ‘The Difference in Women’s Hedonic Lives: A Phenomenological Critique of Feminist Legal Theory’ (1987), West proposes that women have entirely different realities from men, which means that their experiences, or ‘hedonic lives’, are so unlike men’s as to be incomprehensible to them. She states: The quality of our suffering is different from that of men, as is the nature of our joy. Furthermore … the quality of pain and pleasure enjoyed or suffered by the two genders is different: women suffer more than men. … One reason that women suffer more than men is that women often find painful the same objective event or condition that men find pleasurable … many men are simply oblivious – they do not experience at all – external conditions which for women are painful, frightening, stunting, tortuous and pervasive (1987: 81, italics in original) Due to this differential in experience, West argues that women have constructed an alternative subjectivity to that upheld in institutions such as the law. Rather than corresponding to the traditional legal model of selfregard, women, West alleges, often do not act to better their own welfare and indeed frequently consent to their own misery (1987: 93) in order to satisfy the needs of another or the demands of society. Nor do women necessarily act unreasonably in acting against their better interest, as is generally supposed by the traditional model, because, as West points out, their hedonic lives usually militate against more self-regarding action. Women and men develop different subjectivities and phenomenologies, in her analysis, because women live with a pervasive fear of male violence and men don’t live with a comparable constant fear of female violence (1987: 94–5). Understanding between the genders is thus difficult, especially, in West’s formulation, when men attempt to understand women. Men are unable to comprehend women’s experience primarily because women don’t, won’t or can’t talk about it to them (West, 1987: 96). Instead, according to West, women lie, especially about the quality and content of their hedonic lives (1987: 127). Rather than smiling and falsely claiming to be happy in order ‘to fulfil the politically dictated expectations of others’ (1987: 127), West insists women must tell the truth about their pain and misery so that men can understand and respond appropriately. This is particularly necessary when women apply for legal compensation for harms and wrongs done to them, because traditionally legal discourse has forced them into the disadvantageous position of translating their specifically feminine suffering into the masculine terms of legally established rights. Her call for women to end their silence marks her affinity with both MacKinnon’s

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theory of female oppression and Gilligan’s of feminine specificity. Like MacKinnon, West believes that women must find a way to speak within masculine patriarchal discourses to gain visibility and legal redress. Like Gilligan, she argues that women possess different realities and systems of thought which enable them to do this. However, West’s potentially revolutionary thesis, like those of MacKinnon and Gilligan, betrays conservative implications, as its application to the case of Aileen Wuornos will show. A ‘Westian’ reading of the case of Aileen Wuornos would assert that Wuornos’ male clients, police officers and court officials all demonstrated an inability to comprehend or empathize with her pain and misery caused through prostitution and abuse because their subjective realities as men were entirely antithetical to hers as a woman. Her clients’ lack of empathy is evidenced in Wuornos’ claims of savage abuse leading to their murders, while her treatment in the legal institution evinces a notable dearth of judicial sympathy for her plight. Aileen Wuornos was effectively driven to kill and then sentenced to death for doing so due to male obliviousness to female suffering. This depiction of Aileen Wuornos demonstrates both the logic and the flaws of West’s thesis. In the first instance, it exhibits the same limitations as did MacKinnon’s version of the Wuornos case. West’s casting of women as perpetual victims of male violence only emphasizes Wuornos’ early powerlessness rather than acknowledging her later violent agency. Wuornos, according to this reading, remains as victimized by men when she is murdering them as she was when being raped by them. This account stifles Wuornos’ claims of self-defence, and thus her attempt to overthrow her victimhood, in its inability to accommodate women who actively fight against male power and aggression. West’s insistence that women end their victimization through talking to men about their suffering does not pay enough attention to those occasions when words alone are inadequate or dangerous. Women, according to West, inhabit a highly unsafe world, wherein telling those responsible for their pain is an act of courage unattended by the safety victims customarily require in such circumstances.15 Furthermore, Aileen Wuornos’ attempts to narrate her own story illustrate the problems women encounter when they do try to enlighten men of their specifically feminine suffering. Merely demanding that women speak does not necessarily guarantee that men will listen. Male reactions to Aileen Wuornos’ story of her murders have ranged from shock to dismissal but have not included understanding. Yet her tale is certainly devoid of the feminine window dressing West terms ‘lying’. Indeed, Wuornos has argued that men haven’t accepted her version of events because she didn’t attempt to excuse her clients of any responsibility for her suffering.16 West, therefore, may well be correct in encouraging women to tell unvarnished ‘truths’, but her thesis does not account for the unwillingness of some men to hear them. Furthermore, women’s ‘lying’ may not be a product of their own making, but may be determined by the constraints of


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the discourses in which they speak. Although Aileen Wuornos was most articulate in describing her experiences, for instance, she was denied access to the public forum of the legal institution in which to present them because her story did not fit the parameters of the narratives of female criminals allowable in mainstream legal discourse. The three theorists considered in this section exemplify the various theoretical paths leading to the development of the impotent female subject most recently apparent within mainstream legal discourse. Catherine MacKinnon, and victimology theorists generally, conceptualized and quantified the scale of women’s oppression in Western heteropatriarchy. This type of work made women’s subordination and extreme vulnerability to duress and force evident, thereby helping to alter the standards by which women’s participation in criminal activity was judged. Carol Gilligan and other theorists of feminine difference developed a qualitatively new version of moral reasoning which they linked to femininity. This ‘different voice’ precipitated a climate of uncertainty which questioned the monolithic status and myopia of the legal institution’s ‘reasonable man’. However, the genesis of this female subjectivity is shown most clearly in Robin West’s work, where victimology and feminine difference theses are combined, producing a depiction of women victimized as effectively by their understandings of what femininity means as by oppressive circumstances, by their female experience founded upon their female nature. Most importantly, West insisted that women’s specifically feminine suffering was not recognized under the law. Assertions such as hers led to a legal recognition that the subjectivity of the ‘reasonable man’ was not broad enough to entirely encompass women and that another ‘special explanation’ of female criminality was required. A feminist jurisprudence? The concerns that MacKinnon, Gilligan and West raise regarding feminine specificity and the representation of Woman in legal discourse still beset much contemporary feminist legal theory. Current feminist jurisprudence remains focused upon the gendered nature of traditional legal discourse and reasoning, in particular the normalization of the law as universal dogma (Graycar, 1995: 267). Carol Smart has summarized the aims of feminist jurisprudence into three categories: jurisprudence centrally interested in ideas of morality, justice and epistemology; jurisprudence concerned with legal practice; and jurisprudence involved in the deconstruction of traditional legal discourse (1989: 72). The work of MacKinnon, Gilligan and West belongs to the first of these categories. My reading of recent feminist jurisprudence, however, finds that this theory is not as neatly ordered in its concerns as Smart would have. Certainly, much work is being undertaken on legal practice, for instance with new considerations of whether women should be treated under the law via the principle of equality, or that of difference. Yet this same material also includes rethinkings of issues like

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morality and justice, and frequently invokes deconstructionist methods to critique the current legal system. I propose, then, to look at this theory in terms of its major philosophical aims rather than its practical impetus. The first place to begin in such a project is to consider the unresolvable equality/difference debate which still rages through much feminist jurisprudence (Cheah et al. 1996: xv). Zillah Eisenstein summarizes the paradox by which this debate proceeds: ‘when woman is treated as the same as man, she challenges his representation of specificity and is also denied her own specificity; when she is treated as “different”, she is made the “other” ’ (1988: 199). In both instances, as she and Smart (1989), among others, have observed, the male standard is central, with women measured as a special case against a normalized, universalized masculinity. The question of whether to argue for equality or difference becomes moot, then, according to critics of this debate, as men and their concerns remain dominant. Regardless of their inherent circularity, the issues of equality or sameness versus difference or specificity have galvanized various reconsiderations of the law and legal discourse. The first of these that I will discuss here is positioned firmly in the centre of this debate in its argument for the development of a female legal subject. In her paper ‘Sexing the Subject (of Law)’ (1995) Ngaire Naffine concisely explores this quest for feminine specificity within legal discourse, which has been most pervasively demanded by feminists writing on battered women’s tribulations with the legal system (Mahoney, 1991; Stubbs, 1991; Tolmie, 1990; Radford, 1993; Walker, 1990; Ewing, 1987; Loff, 1982; West, 1987). Naffine argues that although women are now supposedly formally included in the gender-neutral language of the law as legal subjects, their specificity as women is thereby excluded. The attributes of the legal subject remain masculine, both culturally and biologically (Naffine, 1995: 30). This situation is especially clear in the cases of battered women, who are still expected in legal discourse either to follow masculine rationality when faced with violence and leave their abusive partners, or to risk being damned with allegations of unreason if they do as many women do and stay. Hence, women’s specific experiences and abilities are not recognized or understood under the law. Instead, they become pathologized ‘special cases’, read against a male standard of reasonableness. Legal discourse needs to accord women subjectivity, both in private and in public, and in Naffine’s terms recognizing the ‘sexed particularity’ of women’s lives is merely the first, but most important, step in this process. This argument will be taken up in more detail in Chapter 3. An extension of the feminine specificity thesis is the position of writers who posit heterogeneity as the revolutionary concept for future legal theory and practice. This argument claims that the notion of heterogeneity bypasses the equality/difference debate altogether. This occurs because, according to Zillah Eisenstein, the very opposition between sameness and difference is collapsed, replaced by an understanding of difference not as lack, or otherness, but as diversity. This means, then, that ‘a person can be different and


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(not un)equal’ (1988: 222). Iris Marion Young supports this view in her critique of ideas of social justice as espoused by traditional legal discourse. She states that one of the principles which the law holds most dear, that of impartial reason, actually works to deny diversity and specificity in three ways: first, by denying the particular features of individual situations in its use of universal principles; second, by its demand for detachment and dispassion which denies the particularity of individual feeling; and third, by insisting that rationality is one ideal that all can adopt, which denies the plurality of subjectivity (1990: 100). In Young’s terms, the very concept of reason in itself only attains coherence by expelling all that would threaten it. The end result of this is that, in practical terms, the law comes to serve a great many men no better than it does women. Instead of impartiality, Young argues, heterogeneity should be our aim (1990: 112), where we understand difference as both variation and specificity, meaning that no one group is privileged over any other and all discourses are seen as partial (1990: 171). Zillah Eisenstein claims that this will allow us to specify both sameness and difference, without universalizing the unity we share (as women, for instance), nor insisting upon our differences from each other to the exclusion of any similarities we might have (1988: 40). A related method of introducing specificity into legal discourse has been developed in feminist legal arguments for recognition of corporeality within the law. Margaret Thornton observes that the body has traditionally been seen as the antithesis of the abstract rationality privileged in the public sphere (1995a: 218). This denigration of the body as a site of knowledge in the public sphere has, then, masked the control which white, heterosexual men exert over public discourses, like legal discourse (Thornton, 1995a: 218). A corporeal consciousness, Thornton argues, would make visible the ways in which homosociality structures the public realm, while demanding a materialist concept of justice responsive to difference (1995a: 217–18). Eisenstein puts forward a similar thesis in her argument for radical pluralism, which assumes that society is constituted by difference structured via unequal power differentials. In order to destroy society’s masculinist hierarchy, and to reach true equality, she claims that discourses like the law must recognize the specificity of the female body in her physicality, race and class (1988: 222). Pheng Cheah and Elizabeth Grosz have critiqued Eisenstein’s, and others’, elaboration of the need for corporeality in legal discourse on the grounds that it merely reverses the mind/body dualism, granting the body primacy. This repositioning, they argue, institutes an ‘original intuitive self-reflexive state of being-in-the-body that is precategorical, prelinguistic’ and thus implies that ‘true’ difference exists which the truth-seeking Law can search out (1996: 6). They, like Vicki Kirby, hold the Spinozan position that there is no division between mind and body, which means that we can’t conceive of an ontologically pure moment in which the body comes to mean without

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the intervention of the corrupting, culturally specific mind. Rather, as Kirby writes: ‘Instead of mind and body, the conjunction that assumes that difference happens at one interface, between entities, we might think the body as myriad interfacings, infinite positionings’ (1997: 148). The body, thus, is not merely a tool of the mind, but is articulate in interaction with the mind over a multiplicity of sites, levels and fields. Moreover, our relationship with our bodies is as much a product of otherness as it is of selfhood. As Cheah and Grosz observe, we understand our embodiment only by being, at the same time, outside ourselves; seeing ourselves only in relation to others, articulating our embodied selves via our relationship to otherness (1996: 23–4). Our very determination that we are embodied takes places in a concept of otherness, our own and others’; therefore, the notion that beingin-the-body might somehow precede culture, and be a product of a sovereign individuality, as Cheah and Grosz posit Eisenstein’s idea of a corporeal consciousness, rings hollow. Cheah and Grosz’s own call for a ‘corporeal justice’ becomes, then, in their perception, oppositional to Eisenstein’s because it makes evident the partiality of the embodied subject within discourse, insisting on the excess of the bodily to any discursive regime, while recognizing that the body is still, nevertheless, not a site of originary truth (1996: 25). The embodiment of the subject, along with the latter’s social features like class and ethnicity, are thus both vital to include within the necessarily partial ambit of ‘the Law’, and impossible ever to totalize within a single discourse. For Cheah and Grosz, calls for an embodied justice, such as Eisenstein’s, which attempt to lift the veil of the blind maiden, making her responsive to phenomenological differences, are inadequate. In their terms, corporeal justice must remain blind, not because of its commitment to the ideals of impartiality and neutrality, but because it is ever in process, inhabiting an ‘ever shifting relation to indeterminable alterity’ (1996: 25). The introduction of a corporeal consciousness into legal discourse is called into question in the work of Drucilla Cornell, who claims that the recognition of any such specificity within law would constitute not a greater justice, but a violation of it. She uses Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘Force of Law: the “Mystical Foundation of Authority” ’ to help determine this concept of justice and the ethical relation. In this essay Derrida clearly distinguishes the practice of law from the attainment of justice. According to his analysis, justice is incalculable, an ‘aporetic experience’ (1992: 16),17 and is thus radically different from law, which he argues is calculable and involves the application of particular rules to particular cases according to determined judgements (1992: 16). Derrida here invokes Emmanuel Lévinas’ concepts of self and other18 to help him explain his point that judicial application of the law cannot ensure justice. Lévinas claims that the other is radically different from the self and therefore cannot be understood through reference to the self. For any such understanding is based on one’s own knowledge of oneself and denies the fundamental alterity of the other. In this view, under-


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standing between self and other is not only appropriative of the other’s otherness, but makes reference to what Derrida calls an ‘implicit third’, in this case legal discourse, which provides an imaginary space in which the self can attempt to understand the other and, at the same time, relies upon generally applicable rules which undermine any such individualistic process. Understanding which is aligned with the separation of the parties involved, as in legal judgement, is therefore necessarily partial, but also implies its own impossibility, on this account. For justice is premised on the ability to speak in ‘the language of the other’. Yet accomplishment of any such juridical understanding is impossibly compromised due primarily to the radical alterity of the other. Furthermore, ‘the Law’ operates within the logic of that which Derrida calls the ‘metaphysics of presence’, which, as Iris Marion Young explains, ‘seeks to collapse the temporal difference inherent in language and experience into a totality that can be comprehended in one view’ (1990: 231). This makes understanding of the other in judicial terms even less likely to achieve realization because of the universalizing impetus of the discourse in which this understanding is theorized and made necessary. The only way justice could enter the process of legal judgement, in Derrida’s terms, would be if the judge were to ‘assume [the rule], approve it, confirm its value, by a reinstituting act of interpretation, as if ultimately nothing previously existed of the law, as if the judge himself invented the law in every case’ (1992: 23). He borrows Stanley Fish’s term ‘fresh judgement’ to summarize this process (Derrida, 1992: 23), which requires that every decision involve a unique and fresh interpretation because every case or situation is different, and because the moment of undecidability common to all decisions which are not mere applications of rules is vital for any judgement to be considered just. Yet, Derrida recognizes that such a situation is illusory, as justice itself is always already aporetic: There is apparently no moment in which a decision can be called presently and fully just: either it has not yet been made according to a rule, and nothing allows us to call it just, or it has already followed a rule – whether received, confirmed, conserved or reinvented – which in its turn is not absolutely guaranteed by anything; and, moreover, if it were guaranteed, the decision would be reduced to calculation and we couldn’t call it just. (1992: 24) Justice is immanent in the judgement process, then, and at the same time beyond it; it operates as a regulatory ideal, yet is forever unattainable. The concept of justice necessarily calls us into a relation with the ‘other’, even if a radically foreign other, whom we must attempt to treat in a just and ethical manner. Drucilla Cornell suggests that we might approach this relationship via Derrida’s concept of ‘phenomenological symmetry’, which

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Cornell implies equal value and respect for the otherness of the other without relying upon a sense of common experience (1992a: 87–8). She argues here against Lévinas’ assertion that such symmetry is impossible because no pre-given universality exists which would allow for it, insisting rather that it is unnecessary for the self to ‘know’ the other through mapping the other’s experience on to a set of human properties which he or she considers definitive of the human. Symmetry is achievable, in her terms, through the granting of validity and parity to the experiences of both self and other and through relations between the two founded on mutual respect and acknowledgement of radical alterity. Phenomenological symmetry forms the basis for Cornell’s programme of equivalent rights. She claims that her concept of equivalence collapses the equality/difference debate because it ensures that men’s and women’s communally agreed upon rights are equally valued, not because they are the same, but because difference is valued and respected for its own sake (1992b: 293). Vicki Kirby provides a trenchant critique of Cornell’s understanding of radical alterity and the consequent ethical relation in her book Telling Flesh (1997). Kirby argues that Cornell misreads Derrida in her presentation of the other as something foreign or external to the self. For, in this circumstance, the only ‘ethical relation’ Cornell can theorize between self and other is one of ‘conscious humility and benevolent obligation’ (Kirby, 1997: 95), where each entity – self and other – is so utterly unified within themselves that they are entirely unable to approach difference as in any way knowable. Derrida, as Kirby is at pains to point out, does not theorize radical alterity in quite this atomistic way. Rather, for Derrida difference resides within the subject as much as it exists outside the subject. The subject is other to itself as it is ‘other’ to the ‘Other’. Hence, as Kirby explains: ‘As impossible as it may seem, the ethical relation to radical alterity is to an other that is, also, me’ (1997: 95). Our very identities are always partial, always becoming and, most importantly, always incorporations of otherness. If we accept Kirby’s understanding of radical alterity, Cornell’s concept of equivalent rights rests, then, on more than our relation with the otherness of the Other. For while we must acknowledge this otherness, we must also recognize our internal differentiation. Furthermore, we must respect that while we are other to the Other, we are also familiar to those with whom we would have an ethical relation. This is not to argue that we hold the whole world inside our heads because we can never escape the prison of our own perception, rather it is to insist that the unknowable is not necessarily outside us, and that our relations with ourselves, like those we have with others, are never resolved, never fixed. Our potential relationship with the Other brings me to the final issue I wish to canvass in relation to feminist legal theory. The problem of citizenship has historically been one of the most troublesome within feminist jurisprudence, informing the equality/difference debate as well as social rights discourses of marginalized groups of all kinds. Yet, as Margaret


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Thornton points out, the actual question of citizenship in itself has received little attention from feminist legal scholars (1995a: 198). In her paper ‘Embodying the Citizen’ (1995a) Thornton traces the development of the concept of citizenship from its Aristotelian roots, when it was considered to determine one’s membership and possession of abstract rights within a politico-legal community (1995a: 200). All citizens were granted rights, but not all who resided within a community were citizens and thus allowed to participate within that polity. One’s degree of participation depended upon variables such as gender, race, ethnicity and class (1995a: 201). In contemporary understandings the notion of equality has demanded that all who legally reside in a community should be granted equal citizenship (1995a: 201). Citizenship now includes formal political rights, some degree of participation in the polity, and social rights which include subsistence, education and economic rights (Marshall, cited in Thornton, 1995a: 202). Equal citizenship would appear a reality, then, in the formal discourse at least. Thornton, however, argues that this is not the case, and that the entire discourse is ‘suffused with masculinist values’ (1995a: 210) which are designed to favour male, not female, citizenship. This is especially evident in the notion of the citizen as neutral, which, she points out, merely denies and occludes difference and allows for male ‘virtues’ of reason and impartiality to assume primacy. Women may have formal equality as citizens, then, but the concept of the ‘neutral citizen’ presents us with what Iris Marion Young denotes as ‘the paradox of democracy’, where some citizens are nevertheless more equal than others (cited in Thornton, 1995a: 215). This is made particularly clear in the equality/difference debate which, as Thornton claims, ‘highlights the conceptual flaw in the terms on which women should be “let in” ’ (1995a: 216), as women can only find a place as citizens if they constantly present themselves in terms of the phallus. One of the aims of feminist theory has been, as Iris Marion Young states, to attempt to develop concepts of citizenship which don’t depend on the neutral citizen values of autonomy and independence, but which recognize ‘feminine’ characteristics such as connectedness, dependence and partiality (1990: 55). The law and legal discourse have, thus, been critiqued from a variety of angles within contemporary feminist legal theory. However, Carol Smart states that feminist jurisprudence, in the main, still preserves ‘the Law’ as the centre of the debate, when feminist theory really needs to decentre ‘the Law’ altogether (1989: 88). We need to develop a contextual justice which is not solely legalistic. This is a Spinozan ideal, as Moira Gatens notes, which allows for a much broader understanding of inequity, crime and responsibility (1996: 40), and which would, inevitably, review ‘the Law’s’ place at the top of the hierarchy in determining inequities and harms, preferring to recategorize it as merely one of many possible responses to injustice. Smart’s idea of decentring ‘the Law’ from feminist jurisprudence would, she argues, then permit feminists to concentrate on the law’s power to define the people and events who come before it, which is a far more important project in her

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terms than continuing to concentrate on its policies and regulations. For the methods and procedures by which the law operates are fundamentally antifeminist (1989: 160), and a focus on them only preserves rather than challenges the force of law. To sum up, then, one might ask the question: where does all of this debate leave the female criminal? Is there a normative female victim left in feminist legal discourse? Certainly, in the various accounts of the law and legal practice reviewed here, this figure appears to have shattered into heterogeneous, radically other bits. Yet some of her basic characteristics persist, engendering the silence regarding women’s intentional and malicious violence which is still apparent in much feminist legal writing. Those who call for an introduction of feminine specificity into legal discourse, for instance, tend to concern themselves with the plight of victims, like battered women, rather than with remedying the incomprehension which greets female sadists. Notions of a feminine justice centre around features considered more female than male, such as nurturance or caring, rather than exploring the ways in which women can exhibit qualities like detachment and autonomy, while men can also nurture and care. Alternative concepts of citizenship have coalesced around perceived feminine virtues like community and reciprocity, instead of recognizing that these are human virtues, which women display as erratically as men. Aileen Wuornos has a paradoxical relationship with contemporary feminist jurisprudence. On the one hand, the introduction of feminine specificity into legal discourse would surely benefit her case in the sense that her plight as a woman attempting to defend herself against male attackers far stronger than her would have to receive greater emphasis and understanding from legal professionals in the courtroom than was apparent at her trial. On the other, cases such as hers tend to run counter to calls for feminine justice, based on nurturance and care, and concepts of feminine citizenship, founded on ideals like community and reciprocity. It is possible to argue that had our society been based on ideals like these, the tragedy of Aileen Wuornos would never have occurred, but this does not take cognizance of the events as they have played themselves out. For, in her actions, Aileen Wuornos exhibited the more masculine qualities of detachment, rather than nurturance; autonomy, rather than connectedness. She asserted, and still does, her right to independent action and her individual need to hurt those who had harmed her. Arguments for feminine specificity must acknowledge these feminine emotions and actions as well as the more traditional and acceptable ones. Proponents of a feminine justice and citizenship must take into account that reciprocity, while intrinsically valuable, is not useful on all occasions. Sometimes a more masculinist form of justice and citizenship, declaring the value of autonomous and independent action, is more appropriate for women in Aileen Wuornos’ situation. Clearly, then, a traditional notion of the feminine still threads through feminist legal theory, even if it is not a feature of all the most contemporary


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studies. Theories on how we might approach female violence and women’s agency and responsibility for it have yet to really integrate calls for heterogeneity and corporeality into their equations. For if we introduce women’s bodies and the sexed specificity of their lives into legal discourse, doesn’t this also mean we must introduce the bodies of some of these women’s victims, especially the inconvenient ones like children and other women? And if we make the injuries on these bodies evident, doesn’t this mean we must make responsibility for those harms evident too? Perhaps what feminist legal theory really needs to do to find a way out of the impasse of the quest for a feminist jurisprudence is to acknowledge otherness, as Vicki Kirby suggests. Yet this otherness is not just in ourselves but, more disturbingly, in those whom feminism still purports to write about, other women, who may choose to behave in decidedly nasty, uncivil and indefensible ways. For in its broadest conception, citizenship is really about humanness, and membership in such a group surely includes a full gamut of desires, abilities, needs and acts.

Narrated and performed selves: a model of subjectivity The model of subjectivity proposed in this study enables consideration of the mosaic of representations surrounding each female murderer. This concept of subjectivity combines Seyla Benhabib’s theorization of narrated selves with Judith Butler’s of performative subjects, to produce subjects who enact a multiplicity of performatives in their telling and retelling of the many discursively situated narratives representative of the self. I argue, following Benhabib, that subjectivity is constituted through the narratives one tells and those told about one. As in Butler’s formulation, however, subjectivity is a fundamentally performative and denaturalized concept referring not to an autonomous and stable entity, but to an array of constructions. Subjectivity relates to the many scripts or roles we undertake throughout our lives, dependent upon the discourses with which we come in contact, the culture(s) we live in and the people we know. Narrativization of these subjectivities is constrained and enabled via discourse, and reliant upon contexts of production and reception for their particular manifestation. Individuals or identities, as I shall discuss further shortly, are thus the focal point of a plethora of widely variable potential subjectivities which are constantly narrated throughout these individuals’ lifetimes. Any one of these subjectivities cannot, therefore, precede its own narration within those discourses which call it into being (Butler, 1993: 124). Instead, as Butler has observed, discourse ‘precedes and enables the constitution of subjectivity’ (1993: 225). The individual or identity remains separate from and never entirely reducible to her or his narratives of subjectivity. This means, in Benhabib’s terms, that even though this identity is formed within the culture and discourses which situate narratives of subjectivity, she or he is not determined

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by them. Identities are rather interpellated19 through their own discursive constitution as subjects (Butler, 1993: 225). The ‘I’ by which one designates possession of identity cannot exist outside of discourse, outside of its perpetual construction as a subject. For, as Louis Althusser has observed, once the ‘I’ is named, it is always already constructed within discourse (cited in Silverman, 1983: 219). Hence, although the individual or identity is not merely the product of various actual and potential subjectivities, nor is identity expressible without, or capable of being divorced from, those subjectivities. Any distinction between ‘identity’ and ‘subjectivity’ is, therefore, purely formal and theoretical, as Silverman notes (1983: 219), as identity is always already interpellated through discourse and constructed as subjectivity. The term ‘subject’, as I noted before, no longer has the same meaning as the conventional concept of ‘self’ as indicative of core identity. Instead, any idea of a ‘true’ selfhood is considered forever elusive. In this study I make no attempt to uncover the ‘real’ selves of the women whose cases are considered here, concentrating instead on excavating the contexts and discursive constraints of the many narratives of subjectivity constituting these cases. Analysis of the multiple discursive positionings of violent women thus allows for a discussion of the ways in which they are represented, or occasionally ignored, without ever buying into a singular notion of who they are. Certain narratives of subjectivity are granted greater social power and status than others. A narrative created in a court of law, for example, will generally be seen as more valid and valuable than one produced, say, in a tabloid newspaper, because legal discourse is valued more highly than is tabloid newspaper discourse within Western societies.20 Legal narratives, moreover, are generally constructed with the object of obtaining particular consequences for the individual about whom they are told. In the case of Aileen Wuornos, for instance, the jury found the prosecution narrative of her behaviour most credible, and thus this narrative ensured her conviction and subsequent death sentences for seven murders. Had the defence narrative been found legitimate, the outcome for Aileen Wuornos would have been very different. The political efficacy of this study demands that legal intentions be considered as intrinsic components in story production. For, as Robert Cover notes, courtroom narratives, especially those foundational to judgements, verdicts and sentences, are also practices, actions, in that ‘[t]he judicial word is a mandate for the deeds of others’ (1986: 1611). Judicial verdicts and sentences are, thus, speech acts, in which, as J. L. Austin observes, the statement and the act are embedded (cited in Butler, 1997: 2–3). First, such statements do what they say: a sentence is in itself an act of violence; while at the same time they produce acts as a consequence: the judge acts through others to achieve the result denoted in the sentence (Cover, cited in Butler, 1997: 3).21 This is nowhere more apparent than in the death sentence, where the judge both acts violently in decreeing such a sentence and sets in motion the deeds of others who will enact her or his demands (Cover, 1986: 1622).


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Subjects are, nevertheless, not merely reducible to discourse, even though I consider subjectivity as an effect of prior discourses (Foucault, 1976: 102). Subjects always exceed the parameters of discourse, just as discourse has a historical and temporal life that is not possessed by the subjects it produces. As Butler observes, the subject is ‘always already lost to or always already expropriated by a past of discourse that I [the subject] do not control … [wherein which the subject is] installed in a historicity that is not my [the subject’s] own, but which is the condition of my own’ (cited in Bell, 1999b: 166). The subject, meanwhile, retains the psyche which ‘exceeds the imprisoning effects of the discursive demand to inhabit a coherent identity to become a coherent subject’ (Butler, cited in McNay, 1999: 184). The psyche is used in Butler’s formulation to refer to the uneven, socially determined process through which the subject internalizes social norms, which leads to a split between the psyche and the various subjectivities the subject comes to occupy across their lifetime (McNay, 1999: 186). The psyche is not reducible to the social, but circumscribes the ways in which the subject comes to occupy ‘liveable sociality’ or subjecthood (McNay, 1999: 186). This concept of the psyche allows Butler to theorize the way in which foreclosure operates at both community and individual levels, as it helps explain why social norms are never completely appropriated by the subject. Any subject construct is differentiated from that which it is not, excluding as well as incorporating, produced, as Butler explains, ‘through the creation of a domain of deauthorized subjects, presubjects, figures of abjection, populations erased from view’ (1995: 47). These foreclosures continually found and refound the subject, meaning that any construction of subjectivity can never be entirely coherent or complete. Subject construction is always in process, always becoming. At the same time, however, the domain of potential subjectivities designated abject, or without subjecthood in a particular discourse, is likewise in a continual process of production. Discursive enablements of certain types of subjects and the disallowance of others effectively designates a realm of the ‘unlivable’ or ‘uninhabitable’ (Butler, 1993: 3) The subject, then, is produced through the regulation of speech, both their own and that of the society in which they live: ‘The question is not what it is I will be able to say, but what will constitute the domain of the sayable within which I begin to speak at all’ (Butler, 1997: 133). Foreclosure operates to determine what is speakable and what must remain unspeakable, and thus ‘unlivable’, within any discourse. Yet, this process does not exhaust the possibilities for subjectification. Rather, those who ‘speak … at the border of the speakable’ persistently redraw the distinctions between the speakable and the unspeakable, the subjectified and the abjectified (Butler, 1997: 139). Aileen Wuornos can be viewed as a subject haunting the borders of the speakable, and thus the subjectifiable, of mainstream legal discourse. For her own construction of herself as a woman acting in self-defence on each of the seven occasions she killed inhabits this zone of the unlivable as it was denied

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legal subject status. Her invocations as ‘heartless thrill killer’ and ‘traumatized child’, on the other hand, were allowable within mainstream legal discourse as acceptable subject constructs. In this way, then, certain versions or interpretations of her behaviour which call into being certain subjectivities were deauthorized, while others were supported. Yet the narrators of the allowed subjectivities (i.e. the prosecution and defence counsel) had continually to fend off challenges posed by the disallowed potential subjectivities, and were thus in a perpetual process of foreclosure and delimitation. Wuornos’ legal subjectivities were thus not only an effect of the historical, social and cultural imperatives of this particular discourse, but the result of an active repudiation of certain kinds of subject formations. This study of women who kill depends on Butler’s conceptualization of the unlivable because this concept makes apparent the constructed nature of subjectivity and the deauthorization of certain subject positions within particular discourses. Like Butler, I am interested in examining just which interpretations of the subject are deemed legitimate, especially within legal discourse, and in questioning those ‘systematic structures of disempowerment [which] make it impossible for certain injured parties to invoke the “I” effectively within a court of law’ (Butler, 1995: 47). However, I wish to explore something more complicated than merely determining which narratives of subjectivity are allowed and which are not. I am also interested in how discursive imaginaries, evinced through metanarratives, work to constrain the production of some narratives of subjectivity and to enable others. Furthermore, I wish to consider situations where a narrative of subjectivity is allowable within one discourse but disallowed in another, thus causing what I call a discursive clash. This situation is clearly evident in the case of Aileen Wuornos, where her own narrative of subjectivity and feminist interpretations such as Lynda Hart’s found no incorporation within mainstream legal or media discourse. The dire effects this exclusion has had for her demonstrates that the abjection of certain kinds of subjectivities can have decidedly visceral consequences: silencing can lead to death. Subject constitution is not dependent only upon narration but also upon performance. Performatives are the enactments of particular scripts or narratives which pertain to particular subjectivities within particular discourses. So subject positions are akin to roles which are narrated and performed. As with theatrical roles, discursive roles are open to individual interpretation: performatives, for instance, delimit one’s actions within a certain script, but also allow for one’s own individual enactment of those actions. A performative, however, is not quite the same as a theatrical performance. Rather than being a ‘bounded act’ which the individual performs self-consciously and deliberately, a performative consists of a ‘reiteration of norms which precede, constrain and exceed the performer’ and are not the product of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’ (Butler, 1993: 234). Performatives are specific effects of discourses, dependent on the historicity of the discourse for their particular shape and methods of forma-


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tion and maintenance. To give an example, Aileen Wuornos, when working as a prostitute, was called upon to enact a script or narrative of subjectivity that was in existence long before she took up this career. Thus, she would wear certain clothes and engage in particular activities relevant to this performative of female gender. The discourse of prostitution insists that women prepare themselves in certain ways for sexual commodification and exchange. The terms of this exchange refer to the long history of female objectification as well as to the economics of the marketplace in which goods and services are provided in return for cash. Hence, when Aileen Wuornos worked as a prostitute, she was inserted into a discourse which enables and constrains particular performatives and narratives of subjectivity based on the historical conventions of the exchange it authorizes. Aileen Wuornos may have enacted the script of prostitute in her own unique way, but she was also always already performing an ancient and delimited narrative of subjectivity. Subject constitution is therefore impossible without the formative power of discourse yet is not fully controlled by the enforced reiteration of norms. ‘Subjectivity’, as is evident from the preceding discussion, does not function merely as a synonym for ‘identity’ in this study, as is frequently the case in other texts.22 Following Butler’s work in Bodies That Matter, ‘identity’ is used to imply a category which includes many subject formations, but which is not reducible to any one of them (1993: 188). ‘Identity’ thus refers both to the manifold of discursively produced subjectivities which enable naming and positioning of that individual, and to that which is beyond or which exceeds particular accounts of subjectivity, which Butler has named the psyche. Aileen Wuornos’ ‘identity’, for example, refers in the first instance to her name, which provides the focus for the many interpretations or subjectivities she engenders. The meaning of her name, then, transcends and exceeds her representations in mainstream legal and media discourses, feminist discourses, even her own narrative of self. Its specificity as a signifier is both emptied out as it is used in reference to a range of diverse potential subject positions (so that we can ask ‘who is Aileen Wuornos?’), and keeps alive the possibility of many more narratives of self in the future. In the second instance, her ‘identity’ also refers to the productive power the name carries; the impetus which demands her narration in a variety of discourses. Finally, it includes recognition of those factors in her case rendered non-narrativizeable which remain outside certain discursive formations of subjectivity. ‘Aileen Wuornos’ thus designates more than Wuornos’ full range of subject positions, yet continues to function as a label for them. This version of identity repeats Paul Ricoeur’s distinction between identity-as-sameness and identity-as-selfhood. Identity-as-sameness ascribes an identity to a person throughout time, whereas identity-as-selfhood indicates changes to identity over time (cited in Fraser, 1999: 95–6). In Aileen Wuornos’ case, her name functions in the first instance to provide identityas-sameness: she retains the name throughout her life. Identity-as-selfhood, on

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the other hand, indicates the various guises in which she comes to mean in different discourses, at different historical and cultural periods, and within different narratives. So identity operates, then, to evince both sameness and difference; singularity through naming, and multiplicity through narration. Identity can never be fully harmonized or unified due to the range of available potential or actual subjectivities and because, like subjectivity, identity is formed via exclusions. Those exclusions, to cite Butler’s lyrical evocation, ‘haunt signification as its abject borders or as that which is strictly foreclosed: the unlivable, the non-narrativizeable, the traumatic’ (1993: 188), and yet also inform the production of the discursive manifestations of identity, the various subjectivities. Although reliant on Benhabib’s concept of narrated selves, my focus in developing this model of narrated and performed subjectivities thus differs greatly from hers. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, Benhabib considers the ‘self’, or in my terms the ‘identity’, to be ‘both the teller of tales and that about whom tales are told’ (1992: 198). Her concept of selfhood is premised on narrative: the ‘self’ consists of multiple narrations. Benhabib’s narrations of self can correspond with what I call narratives of subjectivity. Her interest, however, lies in determining the process by which the self or individual integrates these multiple tales, told both by her- or himself and by others, into a coherent self-identity, a ‘meaningful life history’ (1992: 198). I, on the other hand, am more concerned to consider the various narrations as narratives in their own right and on their own terms, rather than conceiving them as links in a chain or pieces of an integrated life story. My emphasis, then, lies on subjectivity rather than identity, whereas Benhabib seems more engrossed in understanding how an individual consolidates a sense of self from the many and varied tales told about him or her. My understanding of the narrated self is, thus, perhaps closer to that of Ricoeur than that of Benhabib. For Ricoeur’s concept of narrated selfhood provides an understanding of the self which allows for its durability, its sense of stability and persistence over time, as well as its ability to change over time (cited in McNay, 2000: 88). One gets a sense of life story, then, but not of a journey towards sameness and unity, rather a trajectory of difference. Narrative is foundational of selfhood but not totalizing, because there are always elements of experience that remain non-narrativizeable within a given culture; it therefore allows for flux and diversity, yet remains constrained by culturally sanctioned metanarratives (cited in McNay, 2000: 91, 93). My combination of Benhabib’s ‘narrated self’ with Butler’s performative subjectivities in the preceding discussion is especially contentious in the light of the two theorists’ critiques of each other’s work. Benhabib, in particular, considers her project to have little if anything in common with Butler’s. She argues against Butler’s theory of performative subjectivities on the grounds that it cannot account for the human capacity for self-determination, for creativity and resistance, for variation. Humans, she asserts, are agentic and


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capable of engaging in resignification and re-encoding; they are not simply inserted into discourse and transcribed through it (Benhabib, 1995b: 110–11). This complaint is echoed by Lois McNay, who argues that Butler’s account of agency is too formal and abstract, and lacks an account of how agency and performativity are lived and practised by individuals in social settings and historical milieu (McNay, 1999: 178, 2000: 46). Moya Lloyd agrees, stating that Butler’s concept of the performative is marred by its occlusion of ‘the space within which performance occurs, the others involved in or implicated by the production, and how they receive and interpret what they see’ (1999: 210). Butler points out in response that any attempt, such as Benhabib’s, to discover how human agency and self-determination are produced through the development of an integrated and cohesive life story is fundamentally inadequate. She argues rather that ‘the concrete conditions under which agency becomes possible’ within particular discourses, not within particular individuals or social groups, is the more urgent and useful quest (Butler, 1995: 136). Furthermore, she insists that performativity, far from fixing potential significations, can indeed be thought of as resignification, offering as it does endless possibilities for change and permutation. Indeed, agency in her terms is ‘to be found in the possibilities of resignification opened up by discourse’ (1995: 135). Lois McNay disagrees, stating that the lack of a social dimension in Butler’s accounts of performativity and agency means that she fails to really explain how resignification works, particularly at a collective level. After all, as McNay argues, things don’t change purely when discourse changes; there are usually a host of other socioeconomic changes occurring simultaneously with discursive change which make real change possible (2000: 61). Butler, however, as Mariam Fraser points out, offers an alternative account of agency which doesn’t depend on a transcendental subject who is the source of agency – the author of Benhabib’s life story (Fraser, 1999: 28). The productive power of discourse is crucial to this concept. For, in Butler’s reformulation, agency is not a property of the subject, but an effect of the power of discourse and, especially, of the ways in which we are addressed within discourse. Agency, thus, is the ‘effect of discursive conditions’, ‘a contingent and fragile possibility opened up in the midst of constituting relations’ (1995: 137). A social dimension is thus central to a Butlerian analysis of agency, as we need ‘a critical perspective on the kinds of language that govern the regulation and constitution of subjects’ if we are to understand how we come to exercise any agency at all (Butler, 1997: 27). Another critique of Butler’s account of subjectivity comes from Vicki Kirby, who claims that Butler emphasizes signification over matter to the detriment of her argument. In Kirby’s view, Butler deals only with representation, never with the stuff, the matter of such representation (Kirby, 1997: 107). Butler argues that because we can’t escape representation, there can be no access to a materiality of bodily life separate from representation or, in

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other words, from discourse and language (cited in Kirby, 1997: 103). Instead, our sense of the materiality of matter is rendered unspeakable in her account; the only thing we can know about the body, about materiality, is that it exceeds discourse (Kirby, 1997: 108). Thus, when Butler considers the body, she does so, according to Kirby, as a text, not as substance (Kirby, 1997: 126). She therefore reinvokes the mind/body split, wherein the mind communicates and the body does not (Kirby, 1997: 127). Kirby disputes this idea, posing the possibility that the body, the material, might well be articulate in its own right. She argues that rather than being a mere surface, the nature of matter may be generative, able to ‘conceive … and construe itself through an involved re-presentation, or differentiation of itself’ (1997: 115). In other words, representation is material and both are emergent and made to mean within the domain of culture where there is no exteriority of matter from language and vice versa. Matter is not the origin or the outside or the unspeakable of language/representation, and language/representation is not immaterial, not the culture founded on the nature of matter. Butler, Kirby argues, needs to theorize an embodied subject which recognizes the body as a field of information, full of representational complexity and ambiguity (1997: 148). Seyla Benhabib’s and Judith Butler’s analyses have very different objectives: Benhabib is engaged in theorizing the formation of the ‘self’, whereas Butler is involved in the very different task of considering the constitution of ‘subjects’. They thus approach the question of subjectivity from quite different angles. Benhabib looks at the development of the individual as it produces itself and is produced by others within a range of social institutions, not all of which she labels discursive regimes. Butler, on the other hand, defines discourse with much broader parameters than does Benhabib, and studies the ways in which it enables and constrains the production of subjects. However, Butler’s idea of a performative subject and Benhabib’s of a narrated one are not as antithetical as Benhabib would have it. If Benhabib’s concept of discourse is broadened to equate with Butler’s understanding of the discursive character of social institutions, then the connections between Benhabib and Butler can be usefully exploited. For integration of the two theories allows for subjects who constitute themselves and are constituted by others through narratives which are always already produced through pre-existing, discursively regulated performative structures, while retaining identities which exceed the sum of these various subjectivities. Most importantly, given Kirby’s critique, these are embodied subjects who force any discussion of subjectivity and identity back to the practicalities and realism of lived existence. They may be represented very differently in various discourses, but they also live, bleed, kill and die as ‘real-life’ women. This approach means that the model of subjectivity proposed here avoids the abstraction of which Butler is often accused, while integrating broader social concerns in a way that Benhabib does not.23 My project is akin to Rosi Braidotti’s in that I wish to place at centre stage the


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feminine body, the concerns of ‘real’ women, not as a totalizing gesture but as an anchoring device which enforces emphasis on the pragmatic, the political, the here and now (Braidotti, 1994: 46–7). One of the most important features of this model of a narrated and performed subjectivity is the concept of agency that forms its core. Instead of denying the agentic character of subjects who are overdetermined by discourse and culture, narrativity and performativity are intrinsic to any understanding of it. Benhabib observes that acts are only identifiable as acts, and actors only become visible and/or intelligible, through narrative (1992: 127). Agency, then, can be considered a product of narrative, an effect of the discursive constitution of narrated and performed subjectivity. On this understanding, narrative and discourse provide, as Butler notes, ‘the necessary sense of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible’ (1990b: 147). The possibilities and degrees of agency, like narrative possibilities, are dependent upon but not determined by the discourse in which they are articulated. This is to recognize the historical and social construction of agency within particular discourses without denying individuals’ responsibility for their acts or their productive role in the creation of their own subjectivities. Subjects create themselves and are created differently depending upon their positioning within, and the type of, discourse in which they are presenting themselves or being presented. Acts produce agents, doers are the effects of deeds; however, subjects are also capable of the active redeployment and renewal of the discourses through which they are constituted. Agency, then, resides in the subject’s resignification of discourse: subjects reinvent discourses with each new inscription of their actions. Discourses, thus, limit and enable the formation of subject positions, to which are ascribed varying degrees of agency. Yet subjects inhabit these positions in their own unique ways, which allows for the reinvention of the terms on which agency becomes possible. Due to its focus on narrative, this concept of agency avoids some of the problems associated with Butlerian/Foucauldian accounts. As Lois McNay has argued, a more generative understanding of agency, which allows for creativity and innovation as well as for resistance and subversion, is produced when one integrates a Ricoeurian concept of narrative identity with a Butlerian/Foucauldian theory of discursive agency. For narrative identity, as I noted above, provides coherency while at the same time accounting for change; let the subject be the narrator/hero of his or her own story without being the author of his or her own life (cited in Fraser, 1999: 99). This focus on narrative in identity and subjectivity formation means that the subject is both active in negotiating their relationship between ‘embodied particularity and material relations’ (McNay, 2000: 16), between the personal and the social, and yet is also constituted by the demands of hegemony. My emphasis on narrativity and performativity, then, leads to a concept of a subject who is both determined and voluntarist; who is both

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forced to perform the roles demanded of her, and yet who always retains the ability to act unpredictably and innovatively. Excavation of the questions of how agency is accounted for, and conversely of how agency becomes impossible to narrate within particular discourses, allows me to demonstrate the ways in which traditional legal and media representations of women who kill deny agency. These questions, particularly in respect to legal subjects, rarely proceed without some discussion of the issue of responsibility. The female killers discussed in this study are first and foremost subjects of the law, as my research concentrates on their legal portrayals during their trials. The agency of the legal subject hinges on culpability and responsibility, as defendants are only held fully accountable if they are deemed entirely responsible for their actions. If they are found to be less than completely responsible, whether because of duress, mental incapacity, extreme fear or extreme anger, they are also considered less liable and, therefore, less punishable. As my concern is to investigate the conditions under which female agency is made possible or impossible within legal discourse, part of this exercise necessarily involves examination of the idea of responsibility. A theorization of experience is also foundational to any discussion of agency. Like agency, experience is discursively constituted, at least to the extent that it requires narration for verbal communication. According to Anthony Kerby’s study Narrative and the Self, we emplot our experiences so that they form coherent stories located within particular discourses (1991: 84). However, not all experiences are equally communicable within all discourses at all times. In this study I wish to consider the constraints and enablements discourses place on the communication of experience. In particular, I am interested in the process by which certain discourses provide possible narratives for some experiences, while rendering other experiences non-narrativizeable. For instance, although Aileen Wuornos communicated her experience of defending herself, this narrative was not translated into a legal narrative because it was perceived illegitimate within legal discourse. Thus, her experience, communicable elsewhere, was outside the parameters of the sayable within that particular discourse. Individual discourses’ legitimations of what counts as ‘experience’, according to Joan Scott’s essay ‘Experience’, are always politically motivated and under contestation by those whose experiences are not included in certain constructions (1992: 37). New words, phrases and concepts are continually created in attempts to express the hitherto unexpressed within various discourses. This task is extremely important because, according to Scott and Kerby, individuals form subjectivities through their narrations of experience. When a particular discourse fails to acknowledge certain experiences, then, this effectively militates against subjectivity formation around those experiences within that discourse. To use an example: before the term ‘date rape’ was coined in modern Western societies, and given partial legal and social acknowledgement as a term for an injurious event/action, a


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woman who had experienced this form of rape was not publicly recognized as a rape survivor. She may have privately identified herself and been identified by others as such a survivor within the discourses of the family, welfare and psychiatry, but her subjectivity would not have been affirmed or redressed in a public, legal manner. Likewise, Aileen Wuornos suffered a similar legal negation of her professed experience of self-defence. Clearly, then, it is politically imperative for such excluded groups to find ways of expressing their experience within dominant hegemonic institutions such as the law; legally acceptable subjectivity formation, and hence legal redress, depend on it. The model of narrated and performative subjectivity invoked in this study forms an important alternative to the monolithic construct of the autonomous, independent, masculinized subject at present favoured within traditional Western legal discourse. It also diverges sharply from the biologically foundationalist subjects found in some feminist theorizing. In particular, this model does not predicate subjectivity on outmoded concepts of naturalized femininity or masculinity. It also integrates self-reflexivity into subject formation, emphasizing the creative function of the discourse itself in the creation of the subjects it purports to represent. The denaturalization of these subject constructs makes evident excluded subject formations, exposing the political imperatives operating within discursive accounts of subjectivity. The lack of a unified subject founded on essentialist premises does not mean, then, that I am unable to speak of women’s experience in a more general sense. Instead, this postmodern version of subjectivity grants me the ability to discuss women’s experience without, as Wendy Brown has noted, anointing such stories as ‘Authentic or True since the experience they announce is linguistically contained, socially constructed, discursively mediated, and never just individually “had” ’ (1991: 72). No ‘truth-effect’ thus attaches to the representations of the female killers analysed here: their subjectivities are considered as merely a few of the many any individual attains in a lifetime. Thus any single one could never exhaust their identities.

Aileen Wuornos: unknowable other/performative self Aileen Wuornos’ case assumes a very different guise when read using this model of judgement and legal subjectivity from those it donned under the perspectives previously discussed in this chapter. Recognition of her radical alterity and the inability of her judges to ever fully ‘know’ her leads to a greater emphasis on examining her tale of events rather than merely dismissing it with contempt, as occurred in the traditional legal treatment of this case. My interpretation of this case thus revolves around very different issues from those canvassed in traditional law and media. Rather than degenerating into a debate over whether Aileen Wuornos was a coldblooded, merciless and monstrous thrill killer or a poor, abused, deluded girl

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who couldn’t stop herself from killing seven men, my reading of this case places Aileen Wuornos’ tale of self-defence at centre stage. I do this not to insist upon the veracity of her account, but because mapping the responses to this particular explanation of her crimes is important in analysing the operation of the responding discourse and in discussing general attitudes towards women like Aileen Wuornos prevailing in Western heteropatriarchy. Most crucially, this process allows me to make explicit the denial with which mainstream legal and media discourses greet stories of female agency, especially those, like Aileen Wuornos’, which assert self-defence. Moreover, the derision her tale engendered tells much about the ways in which women, and specifically prostitutes and lesbians, are positioned within these discourses charged with upholding the conservative and dominant hegemonic viewpoints. The tale assumes primacy, then, not because of a recourse to a supposed ‘truth’ in this case, but because the systematic attempts to render it false reveal a great deal about discursive hysteria and the power of narrative. Equivalent rights, along with an acknowledgement of otherness, are important to this case because such a principle negates the idea that women should be treated and understood in the same way as men. In this reading Aileen Wuornos is considered as a lesbian prostitute working within a heteropatriarchal society, rather than interpreted through masculine concepts of self-defence which entail disbelief that anyone could repeatedly find themselves in situations calling for a fatal expression of self-defence. Her narrative of her behaviour then makes more sense than it has done in mainstream legal and media representations. Context and societal placement become all important in this interpretation, which, although holding Aileen Wuornos responsible for the deaths of seven men, insists that the circumstances of the crimes, the attitudes of the society and her own life story are nonetheless vital in comprehending these homicides. An awareness of context also makes her crimes relevant to the society in which they occurred instead of using distancing and monsterization manoeuvres to disregard them. Furthermore, cognizance of context means that representations of female defendants are less likely to resort to the discourses of the pathological, the mythic or the monstrous. A full appreciation of the discursive constitution of subjectivity has implications for Aileen Wuornos’ case because this recognition entails that any representations are viewed as necessarily partial. Defence and prosecution counsels would not have so consistently reduced Aileen Wuornos to such a narrow range of possible subject positions, had these concepts of performative and narrated subjectivities been recognized within legal discourse. Moreover, recognition of the discursive nature of subjectivity may have forced those responsible for monsterizing and hysterical portrayals to analyse the desires of the productive discourse. Excavation of the myth-bound heart of the legal imaginary by those who practise within its confines may then have become more of a reality than remaining a fantasy as it currently does.


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Conclusion This chapter has sought to provide a comprehensive overview of the models of subjectivity apparent in mainstream and feminist legal and media discourses which emerge in the case studies to follow. Interrogation of these various models also prefigured the development of a model of narrated and performative subjectivity invoked throughout the rest of this study. Subject constructions in law and media were not delineated only to provide historical precedent for my own theory, but also because they are currently in use and impacting upon many female defendants’ lives. In the main they form the primary topic of investigation here, as the case studies present their different aspects and strategies of representation. The case of Aileen Wuornos provided a guide on this journey through the narratives of subjectivity considered in this chapter. Her incarnations as merciless thrill killer and pathetic abused child function as clear examples of mainstream legal discourse’s exclusion of women from its construction of rational subjectivity in terms of the monolithic figure of the ‘reasonable man’. Her media appellation as serial killer, which mirrors the negative images and derisory tone of legal counsel, demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between the media and the law. The dismissal of her own presentation of events in these mainstream discourses highlights their inability to account critically for female agency. That this may have been due to wilful blindness is made apparent in Lynda Hart’s feminist reading of the case, which exposes Aileen Wuornos as the embodiment of some of Western heteropatriarchy’s greatest fears. In a bid to reduce the threat Aileen Wuornos and others like her represent, the mainstream legal institution has been shown to depict female criminals in terms of a few standard narrative frameworks. Originally, these revolved around either ‘mad’ or ‘bad’ portrayals, both emphasizing irrationality and lack of human agency as the offender is presented either as an insane victim or as a mythically evil, inhuman monster. Aileen Wuornos’ portrayal as a thrill killer occupies the latter category. Her ‘abused child’ subjectivity, however, employs a third narrative which has more recently arisen with the advent of feminist interventions in legal discourse. I have dubbed this representation the ‘impotent victim’ model. It indicates the coalescence of two major theses in feminist theorizing, victimology and feminine difference, and has produced a subject whose victimhood and powerlessness are the hallmarks of her difference from men. In an attempt to avoid these stereotypes, I have based my model of subjectivity on an integration of Seyla Benhabib’s concept of a narrated self with Judith Butler’s theory of a performative subject. Subjectivity is considered multiple and fragmented, bereft of any ‘truth-effect’. Via this model, Aileen Wuornos is presented not as a ‘true’ self, but as many subjectivities whose value is determined by the socially ascribed worth of the discourse in which each is situated. No one reading is thus sufficient to encompass her

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case or that of any other female murderer, but some readings are given more credence than others because of their discursive status. This concept of a narrated and performative subjectivity is most effective and appropriate because it allows for an examination of the case studies in all their complexity and incoherence. This approach enables exploration of the many different subjectivities of the women killers included here, and so is better equipped to handle the contradictions and differences evident in those representations. As this model does not insist on a presentation of a unified subject, discussions regarding the moral reprehensibility of the women’s acts, or conversely the celebration of them, are sidestepped. Evaluation of the women killers is thus avoided in favour of an investigation of the various imagings and imaginings, deconstructing the process of their production. This activity is predicated on the knowledge that ‘we’ can never entirely understand the other, that all ‘we’ can ever have access to are representations of the other, and that ‘we’ would do well to comprehend the productive constraints and enablements of the discourses in which these representations are situated. There is no room here for an essentialist, naturalized, ‘true’ subject, except insofar as such a subject is constructed within and by a particular discourse at a particular time, in a particular place and for particular political reasons, thus avoiding the mystique in which the Western legal system and traditional legal discourse is often held. This is not to deny the importance of this particular discourse; its societal positioning is vital for its effectiveness and cultural credibility. It is, however, to insist upon its denaturalization and its deconstruction. The legal imaginary, which informs the legal representations of the women killers under scrutiny here, indicates the mythic dimension of Western society’s cultural capital: excavation of this mine of archetype and legend is both socially utilitarian and personally fascinating. The use of the model outlined here will recognize the agency and responsibility of the women killers analysed in this study, while at the same time considering their circumstances in both a specific and in a broader societal sense. It will support punishment for transgressions against communally agreed upon rights without also insisting upon monsterizing and distancing representations. Rather than focusing on particular women and allowing sole expression of moral outrage to fall on their persons, such a perspective can encompass social problems and gesture towards social change. Finally, it will allow for a view of women who kill as creative producers of their own narratives of identity, as well as performers of the gender role of female as it is understood in Western society. It will recognize that each woman, in the narrative of herself as the author of the crime as presented in court, emphasizes her autonomy but also her connectedness to others, her responsibility but also her society’s failure to help her and so forestall the crime.

3

Inconceivable survivors Battered women who kill

Introduction Battered women who kill their abusers occupy an especially anomalous position within Western heteropatriachal cultures. In the first instance, their killings are particularly traumatic for the dominant discourses of heteropatriarchy because they challenge one of its major institutions, exposing the family as a site of violence and fear rather than perpetuating a myth of safety and care. Second, the women are themselves deeply perplexing, viewed as both victims and perpetrators, as culpable yet blameless. In short, they inhabit a paradox, where extreme victimization leads finally to lethally effective retaliation. In this chapter I will analyse mainstream and feminist, legal and media, discursive constructions of the violent female subject as located in the cases of R v R,1 R v Sainsbury and R v Kontinnen. The first of these cases was selected for study because it demonstrates mainstream legal discourse’s attempts to come to terms with a battered woman’s killing of her abusive husband before expert evidence concerning battering relationships was legally admissible. R v Kontinnen allows consideration of an explanation of female violence offered by feminist legal discourse, as it was the first case in Australia in which Battered Woman Syndrome (hereinafter BWS) testimony was admitted, in support of a complicated defence of provocation and self-defence. R v Sainsbury offers a British perspective, wherein testimony relating to battering was admitted, in support of a defence of diminished responsibility. These three cases demonstrate the inflexibility of the legal system and the lack of self-referentiality in modern Law. In its attempt to retain an objective, impartial stance towards the cases it evaluates, the legal system tries to develop absolute standards and to impose them inflexibly. Cases like the three considered here make apparent the masculinist bias and partiality endemic in any such appeals to equity and neutrality. Specifically, these cases show that the codings of the defences of provocation, diminished responsibility and self-defence are fundamentally inadequate for battered women who kill because they do not consider sufficiently the socially produced differences between male and female behaviour in intimate relations.

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Inconceivable survivors

Moreover, cases involving battered women who kill their batterers illustrate very clearly the extreme ramifications of Western democracies’ allegiance to the legal and social ideology of the public/private split. This doctrine has meant that, historically, public watchdogs, like the Law, have considered violence within the family outside their purview and thus as less criminal than aggression occurring on the street or between strangers. Left with little effective legal recourse, the most brutalized of battered women thus often possess only the option of murder to end their misery. Although battered women who kill challenge and traumatize mainstream legal and media discourses, they also demonstrate the greatest potential of any violent women for recuperation within those and feminist discourses. The supreme threat they engender is allayed via victimism, which works to recuperate images of battered women, enfolding them once again within their society as ‘good’ women. The feminist legal theory of the Battered Woman Syndrome has been particularly influential in effecting this outcome. Recuperation is also produced via the feminist strategy of the revenge fantasy, which eschews the image of the victim, though not that of the ‘good’ woman, in favour of that of a woman finally and fatally overcoming her oppressor.2 Although this narrative is not efficacious legally, it nevertheless flourishes in feminist media discourse and occasionally in the popular mass media. This chapter argues that battered women who kill need recognition of their accountability for their crimes and acknowledgement of their agency without a concomitant increase in their liability for punishment. This can be achieved through application of the current laws of self-defence. The chapter begins with a brief consideration of common and entrenched attitudes in Western societies towards domestic violence and spouse murder, followed by an overview of legal regulations and defences in cases where battered women kill their abusers. The case of Mrs R. demonstrates mainstream legal discourse’s traditional, ‘commonsensical’ constructions of violent women, while the cases of Erika Kontinnen and Pamela Sainsbury examine feminist representations of battered women. The final section addresses issues of agency and recuperation in these discourses and argues for the production of an alternative battered woman subject who can be at once responsible and agentic, yet vindicated and absolved.

‘Aggression, like charity, begins at home’3 The assault and battery of women by the men with whom they are in intimate relationships is perhaps the most common of all criminal acts in the modern West. Commentators have suggested that physical abuse is a feature of as many as 50 per cent of cohabiting couple’s lives,4 and this percentage rises with separation. According to Martha Mahoney, approximately twothirds of women who are separated or divorced report battering by their ex-partners (1991: 3). Women are also nearly three times as likely as men to


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be the victims of spouse homicide (Manning, 1996: 7), which accounts for almost half of the female murder toll each year (Westbury, 1991: 82). Yet, neither the general public nor the legal system has historically perceived crimes like wife5 battering to be overly serious.6 Several studies have shown, for example, that women are less than satisfied with police response in domestically violent situations.7 Police were found to lack empathy for the victims of domestic violence and to consider these offences low status, unworthy of the time they took away from the policing of crimes deemed more important, like armed robbery (Ferraro, 1998: 221). Judicial attitudes to domestic violence are strikingly similar. Studies demonstrate that the perpetrators of domestic violence receive rather more consideration and sympathy in court than are shown to the victims of such crimes (Easteal, 1993: 163–4).8 Breaches of domestic violence orders are likewise not viewed as especially heinous crimes in judicial eyes (Easteal, 1993: 167). This leniency is not necessarily connected to the actual laws themselves. Ngaire Naffine reminds us that in parts of Australia, at least, domestic assault now carries a more severe maximum penalty than assaults that occur in public (1997: 66). The trivialization of domestic violence performed by men does not appear to extend to battered women who finally kill their abusers, many of whom are treated more harshly by Western courts than men who kill their wives. United Kingdom figures, for example, show that nearly 40 per cent of women tried for spouse killing are convicted of murder or manslaughter, compared with only 25 per cent of men (Armitage, 22.10.91).9 In Australia, on the other hand, about 43 per cent of both male and female offenders are convicted and imprisoned (Polk and Ransom, 1991: 22). Real parity is still a long way off, however, because the reasons for and the circumstances of the killings differ vastly depending upon the gender of the accused (Polk and Ransom, 1991: 22–3). Men are far more likely to kill because of jealousy and possessiveness, and are more likely to premeditate and carefully plan the homicides than are women. Women tend to kill spontaneously in order to protect themselves from violent and potentially lethal assaults (Polk and Ransom, 1991: 22–3).10 Far from demonstrating justice, then, such similar rates for conviction and imprisonment indicate only inequity for battered women who kill. Women who kill out of fear and desperation are clearly not in the same category as men who kill because of a need for control. The existence of these equal rates also puts paid to the popular notion that women are treated more leniently under the justice system than their male counterparts.11 Laws against domestic violence already exist and only need application (Scutt, 1983: 196–7). However, the myth of the battered woman nevertheless remains current in legal discourse and stands in the way of any consistent employment of these laws. This very traditional view of women and the family which underpins the legal treatment of domestic violence depends on the twin notions that women are the chattels of men, particularly their

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husbands, and that they are the repositories of those attributes necessary to male well-being which are generally absent from masculine culture and public life. This enshrinement of a picture of heterosexual marriage relations in which women are responsible for nurturing and maintaining relationships leads inexorably to victim blaming in cases of domestic violence, where unions have clearly broken down. The woman becomes responsible for the violence done to her because she insufficiently tended the relationship. Emphasizing female culpability makes it unnecessary to concede that domestic violence constitutes serious criminal assault. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’: the public/private split Batterers are protected from the consequences of their actions largely because of the doctrine of the public/private split which has been entrenched in Western legal thought for centuries. This doctrine entails the division of society into two spheres: the public realm of work, politics and law, and the private realm of home and family. In the purest formulation of this theory the state is not considered to have any ethical or moral right to intervene in anything which happens within the private sphere. Although modern Western societies have modified these beliefs so that the state can and does concern itself in much of what is deemed private,12 the home is, nevertheless, still viewed as the private domain of its residents. The laws of privacy reinforce this understanding, ensuring that the state can act only in certain, well-specified ways with regard to this sphere. This dichotomous ideology of public/private has proven the greatest obstacle to societal awareness of the dangers privacy can entail, especially for women and children.13 For it is regularly invoked, particularly in cases involving domestic violence, even though, in Lois McNay’s terms, ‘the relationship between the two realms has become more complex in late-modernity’ (2000: 70).14 Legal reliance on the concept of privacy continues because, as Martha Mahoney so incisively observes, it suits many of the participants in any trial focused on domestic violence, as ‘at least four of the fifteen or more actors in an average criminal action – jurors, judges and attorneys – probably will have experienced or committed at least one domestic assault’ (1991: 14). Not only do social stereotypes of domestic violence abound in courtrooms, then, but personal biases and responses to spousal abuse do as well (Mahoney, 1991: 14). Keeping domestic battery a private matter is more entrenched in the legal and social psyches than the numerous public and legal education campaigns insisting on the opening up of the private to public scrutiny would suggest.

‘Man-made’ defences for battered women who kill Western legal systems are constructed around the advancement of male pursuits and the resolution of male disputes. This bias is particularly notice-


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able when the legal defences to homicide are considered, for these defences cover male activities in situations in which men are more likely than women to find themselves. Battered women who kill their batterers are in an invidious position, then, hampered first by the non-application of extant laws against domestic violence and second by the legal requirement to utilize defences for homicide which relate primarily to male experience. Defining ‘murder’ In nations which have adopted the Westminster system of government, such as Britain, Australia and Canada, a crime is composed of two elements: a wrongful act (actus reus) and a guilty mind (mens rea) (Srivastava et al., 1996: 307). A homicide, the killing of one person by another, may be lawful or unlawful depending upon the circumstances in which it was committed and the intention of the person committing it. A murder is an unlawful killing committed by a sane person, able to discern right from wrong, who intended to kill the victim or to cause injury (Srivastava et al., 1996: 310). If a defendant is convicted of murder in Australia, a sentence of life imprisonment is prescribed for all jurisdictions, although in some a lesser sentence may be imposed. In all jurisdictions a non-parole period may be recommended (Butterworth’s Concise Australian Legal Dictionary, 1997: 243). In Britain life imprisonment is the mandatory sentence for murder,15 although the judge retains the discretion to recommend to the Home Secretary a minimum period of imprisonment which should be served before the Home Secretary exercises the power of release on licence (Card, 1984: 155). Manslaughter is also an unlawful killing, but one which is judged nonintentional. There are two categories of manslaughter: voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary manslaughter has occurred when the killing was deliberate, but mitigating factors were present. Involuntary manslaughter has occurred when the killing was unintentional, but the killer acted in an improper or reckless manner and this resulted in death. There are seven possible defences to the charge of murder: self-defence, provocation, diminished responsibility, insanity, suicide pact, negligence and recklessness. The defence of self-defence is considered a complete answer to the charge and results in acquittal. The defence of provocation provides for circumstances in which the defendant lost control as a result of the victim’s behaviour and killed the victim. This defence operates as a partial defence, reducing the charge from murder to voluntary manslaughter. The defence of diminished responsibility also reduces the charge of murder to voluntary manslaughter, claiming that even though the killing may have been deliberate, the defendant’s mental responsibility for it was impaired at the time of the crime. A defendant will have no case to answer, if they can be proved to be insane or to have been insane at the time of the murder. Judges can order long-term psychiatric treatment in this circumstance. A killing committed as part of a suicide pact can also reduce the charge of murder to voluntary

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manslaughter, but the burden of proof that the pact existed rests with the accused. Crimes of murder and voluntary manslaughter usually carry longer prison sentences than crimes of involuntary manslaughter. Battered women who kill are often charged with murder in the first instance, and then seek to use one of the defences reducing that charge to voluntary manslaughter, or to employ the defence of self-defence. I will now outline the three most popular defences in these cases: diminished responsibility, provocation and self-defence. Defences to murder: diminished responsibility The defence of diminished responsibility negates the intent element in the crime of murder. It rests on the defendant’s possession of an abnormality of mind at the time of the killing which was so different from that of an ordinary person that the reasonable man would consider it abnormal (Card, 1984: 101). Such states of mind include morbid and psychopathic jealousy, reactive depression, hysterical dissociation and hypoglycaemic episodes (Williams, 1983: 687, 695). The abnormality of mind cannot be induced by intoxication, everyday jealousy or hatred. Finally, this abnormality must have substantially reduced the defendant’s ability to control his or her conduct (Card, 1984: 101). Battered women use this defence to argue that their years of abuse have rendered them mentally unstable and hence incapable of forming an intent to murder (Downs, 1996: 4). The defence of diminished responsibility is not usual for battered women who kill in Australia, where judges have discretionary power in sentencing. This defence is more common in Britain, as judges lack that power in murder cases. Many legal theorists and practitioners claim that diminished responsibility, and its less common corollary defence, insanity, are inappropriate for battered women who kill because they carry the possibility of long sentences of psychiatric treatment which may be even longer than sentences for manslaughter. Australian lawyer Bronwyn Naylor points out that these defences are also often viewed as deplorable because they pathologize the women, depicting them as ‘sick’ or ‘mad’, and rob them of any agency for their crimes, presenting them as unaware of their actions at the time of the killings even though they may have been in very dangerous, life-threatening situations. Defences to murder: provocation and self-defence The defences of provocation and self-defence are the most popular defences in Australia when battered women kill. The defence of provocation relates only to circumstances where the defendant lost control, but was not in fear of his or her own life (Card, 1984: 168). The definition of this defence now includes provocative words as well as actions (Srivastava et al., 1996: 322; Card, 1984: 168). The classic textbook case used to describe provocation


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involves a husband returning home unexpectedly and discovering his wife in bed with another man committing adultery. He, provoked and angered beyond endurance, then kills the wife, her lover or both. Crucially, for female killers, the reverse situation where a woman kills an unfaithful husband is not mentioned and is certainly not considered in the same lenient manner by the courts (Scutt, 1983: 189). Two recent amendments to the law of provocation have made it more accessible to battered women who kill. These amendments removed the requirement of suddenness, so that the defendant need not have killed the victim immediately following the provocation but at some later time, and allowed for the consideration of cumulative provocation, thereby admitting a whole history of provocative conduct, rather than merely one provocative incident (Manning, 1996: 12–13; Card, 1984: 168–9). The doctrine of self-defence rests on four aspects: (1) that the defendant reasonably believed that the threat was serious, and that an ‘ordinary person’ in the same situation would do so also; (2) that the threat was imminent; (3) that the defendant’s response was proportional to the threat; and (4) that the victim’s threatening behaviour was unlawful. Self-defence is traditionally allowed only when the retaliation of the defendant to the threat of the victim is immediate, directly following the victim’s threats or actions. A time lag between the threat and the response usually renders self-defence unavailable. The defendant is expected, although not required, to retreat if possible, making plain his or her desire to end the hostilities by physically moving away from the attacker (Williams, 1983: 522). The example typically used to describe situations in which the defence of self-defence might be used is that of a pub brawl between two equally armed men of comparable size and strength which results in the death of one of the parties. In the last decade the law of self-defence has undergone some modifications which, as with the defence of provocation, now render its usage less problematic for battered women who kill. The first of the requirements, that of reasonable belief, is now tested taking into account the woman’s personal characteristics and circumstances, instead of merely comparing her situation to that of the ‘reasonable man’. The immediacy requirement has also been considerably broadened, so that instead of a requirement that the killing take place during or immediately following an attack, the necessity of the killing now requires only the imminent likelihood of an attack upon the defendant by the victim. The proportionality requirement is no longer integral to the defence of self-defence and is now only one factor for juries to consider when determining the necessity of the killing. Finally, the duty of retreat is abrogated in cases where defendants are attacked in their own homes, particularly in situations involving domestic violence (Manning, 1996: 15–16; Mahoney, 1991: 84). Regardless of their modification, however, the defences of provocation and self-defence still tend to accommodate situations men find intolerable in either their domestic or their public relationships. Certainly, in both

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instances, the provocative or threatening behaviour on the part of men has to be a great deal more intense for women who kill to take advantage of these defences, than it needs to be when men kill their female partners. Women’s experience of constant brutality and intimidation cannot compare in terms of destructiveness with situations men find provocative, such as threatened or actual separation or infidelity. The modifications to both defences have gone some way to redressing the masculinist bias of these defences, but they have by no means introduced a level playing field for men and women in respect of their usage. The most important differences between the defences of provocation, diminished responsibility and self-defence, apart from their obvious legal outcomes, are that the first two function as excuses, while the last operates as a justification. Excuse defences merely mitigate the penalties for acts which are deemed essentially wrongful and ‘inherently irrational’, ensuing from loss of control (Tarrant, 1990: 150). Justification defences, on the other hand, defend ‘rational, necessary killings’ (Tarrant, 1990: 148) which are inherently rightful. A justification defence presents the act as appropriate and reasonable, while an excuse defence presents the actor as inherently irrational and the act as not to be publicly encouraged or defended (Busch, 1999: 17; Downs, 1996: 9).

Battered woman syndrome Many feminist legal researchers and practitioners have made it their task to ensure that the realities of life for battered women who kill are seen and aired in court in order to untangle the conundrum such women are usually seen to represent. The criminal trials of these women are viewed as particularly important for feminist study because they are an index of the attitudes that the community and the legal system hold about men and women at any one time in that society’s history. Ngaire Naffine has observed that within legal discourse, battered women who remain in dangerous situations don’t and can’t fit the legal understanding of the subject as a rational, independent, autonomous being (Naffine, 1995: 34). This has led to the situation Lorraine Radford describes (1993: 177), in which jurists, police and legal personnel commonly ask four key questions of a battered woman: why didn’t she leave?; why didn’t she seek help?; did she deserve her treatment in some way?; how did she manage to cope with so many incidents of violence and humiliation? Each of these questions, Radford argues, assumes that the battered woman is somehow responsible for the violence (i.e. she could have ended it sooner and more peaceably). Moreover, the first of these questions is based on several flawed assumptions, as it presumes that battered women never try to leave when many do, and implies that leaving a violent relationship is both easy and effective in actually ending the abuse (Busch, 1999: 57). To alleviate this situation Martha Mahoney suggests that a better question would be ‘why


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didn’t the men let their partners go?’ (Mahoney, 1991: 83). This question wouldn’t imply the woman’s sole responsibility for solving an intolerable situation, and it would make clear the immense difficulties many women experience in separating. In their attempts to make evident the hidden and to make relatively simple the complex, some feminist legal theorists have posited a new story of the battered woman which, to a large extent, depends on findings drawn from the clinical practice of American psychologist Lenore Walker. Having counselled many battered women, including some who had killed, over a number of years, Walker concluded that battered women developed certain behavioural patterns designed to increase their chances of survival in battering relationships. She termed these patterns ‘Battered Woman Syndrome’, now officially recognized as a sub-category of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In Terrifying Love: Why Battered Women Kill and How Society Responds (1990) Walker defined the term ‘battered woman’ thus: a battered woman is a woman who has been physically, sexually, or seriously psychologically abused by a man in an intimate relationship, without his regard for her rights, in order to coerce her into doing what he wants her to do at least two times, often in a specific cycle. (1990: 35) The cycle she refers to involves three phases: (1) the ‘tension-building phase’ characterized by minor abuse by the batterer and attempted placation and management of the violence by the woman; (2) the ‘acute battering incident’ during which uncontrolled and savage abuse is directed at the woman by the batterer; and (3) the ‘loving contrition phase’ during which the batterer can be remorseful, apologetic, nurturing and will usually promise his victim that his violence will never occur again, allowing the woman to relax and convince herself that he means what he says (Walker, 1990: 42–5).16 This cycle reinforces the woman’s commitment to the relationship because, especially in the third phase, she is victimized psychologically into believing that his contrite behaviour indicates that the man she loved and married has returned, inflating her hopes that, with enough of her care and nurturance, the batterer will change (Walker, 1990: 45). Unfortunately, all that happens in actuality is that the cycle is endlessly repeated and the violence and abuse escalate each time (Walker, 1990: 46). One of the key symptoms of BWS relates to Martin Seligman’s concept of ‘learned helplessness’ (cited in Walker, 1990). Seligman used this term to refer to the belief maintained by some people (or dogs in his original study) that they were not in control of situations. Repeated and unpredictable abuse created a pervasive feeling in these victims that escape or ending the abuse was impossible. They responded to this situation by coping with the violence, and minimizing the pain and injury as much as they could. Walker found this concept useful to explain some of the more perplexing features of

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battered women’s lives, such as their inability to leave the batterers and seek help outside their families. She stresses that her usage of ‘learned helplessness’ does not imply that women learn to be helpless, but describes only their inability to predict the efficacy of their own behaviour due to the capricious responses of the batterer. This in turn causes them to act only in ways which have the highest predictability of probable outcomes, and to avoid any situations which launch them into the unknown (Walker, 1990: 50–1). Battered women experiencing BWS are neither ill nor mad. Lenore Walker explains that the syndrome in no way represents a psychopathology even though it does describe a set of abnormal and unusual behaviours. Rather, the development of this syndrome is entirely normal given the circumstances in which its sufferers live. Once the women are out of the fearful environment, the symptoms of BWS disappear as, according to Walker, the etiology of the syndrome is external to the woman. Defence counsels have found Walker’s theory of BWS a boon to their attempts to introduce juries to the realities of life for battered women who kill, as it can contextualize such killings and explain the women’s states of mind. Evidence of BWS was first admitted in a US court in 1984, and since 1991 has been admitted in most US states; in Canada such testimony was allowed for the first time in the ground breaking case R v Lavallee in 1990.17 In Australia evidence of BWS was first admitted in the case of R v Kontinnen, to be discussed later in this chapter.18 In Britain expert testimony on BWS was first allowed in 1992 in the R v Horley child murder case, and again in the R v Scotland appeal where a battered woman killed her partner. However, as the Sainsbury case will demonstrate, evidence of the type and effects of battering on women who killed their husbands was entering British courts prior to these cases. This syndrome has come under much critique from feminist legal scholars and from welfare and social workers, even though, as Julie Stubbs and Julia Tolmie observe, before the introduction of BWS testimony in Australian courts there had been no reported cases of women who had killed their violent partners who were successful in gaining acquittals (1994: 203). The most trenchant of these critiques come from feminist lawyers like Ngaire Naffine, who argue that BWS has only been developed because battered women aren’t seen as reasonable legal subjects. Along with Robert Schopp, she states that BWS pathologizes battered women. For, regardless of Walker’s denials, Schopp points out that a ‘syndrome’, by definition, is understood to be a psychological disorder, an abnormality in human behaviour (1998: 118–19). Furthermore, BWS creates what Elizabeth Schneider has called ‘a false dichotomy between victimization and agency’, whereby the portrayal of all battered women as victims fails to acknowledge their strength and resilience as survivors with individual agency (cited in Astor, 1995: 189). Relying as it does on the words of expert witnesses, BWS evidence denies battered women


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the right to define their experiences for themselves and for others (Mahoney, 1991: 36). BWS evidence is most useful in supporting defences like diminished responsibility and provocation, which rely on the mental and emotional instability of the defendant, and is rather less useful in supporting the most appropriate defence for battered women who kill, the justification defence of self-defence. Evidence of battering and abuse is clearly useful in determining whether an individual battered woman was in such fear for her life that the killing of her partner was necessary; but evidence as to her psychological state and her subscription to a debilitating syndrome actually undermines such a defence (Schopp, 1998: 111). Moreover, BWS creates and perpetuates damaging stereotypes of battered women and domestic abuse, which attempt to enforce uniformity on a diverse range of abusive situations. Walker’s concept of a ‘cycle of violence’ has received the most criticism in this regard. Researchers like Mary Ann Dutton have found that, rather than a uniform cycle of violence, a battering pattern exists which is individual to particular couples, and which teaches the battered woman to respond to certain signals and cues from her partner (cited in Downs, 1996: 60). This pattern differs from cycle theory in that it emphasizes the diversity rather than the similarity of experience. Another major sticking point for many commentators is the concept of ‘learned helplessness’. This trait presents battered women as ‘women without wills’, according to Donald Downs, thus compromising their equal citizenship through a denial of their agency and individuation (1996: 11). For BWS theory has no discourse of responsibility, preferring simply to deny the intentionality of any and all battered women who kill (Downs, 1996: 12).19 The concept of learned helplessness is also deeply paradoxical. It portrays the battered woman as, on the one hand, unable to accurately perceive the abuser, her situation and her possible options for ending the relationship, which undermines the reasonableness of her beliefs regarding the necessity of murder; while on the other, it apparently provides her with such acute powers of discrimination that she is super-aware of the danger she faces and the consequences for herself if she doesn’t strike first (Schopp, 1998: 103–4, 106). Many battered women who kill don’t subscribe to the theory of learned helplessness either. Instead, they claim they felt hopeless at times because they were unable to receive the external assistance they required to help them escape their domestic abuse (Busch, 1998: 57). As Martha Mahoney observes, then, perhaps learned helplessness is not so much a trait of the battered woman, as of the support agencies and others who are supposed to aid her efforts to leave her violent partner (1991: 61). Regardless of these dilemmas, BWS has had great appeal for Western courts in their attempts to understand and to explain the behaviour of battered women who kill. Ngaire Naffine argues that such explanation is deemed necessary because women’s lives in general are considered exceptional

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in legal discourse, as beyond the conception of the life of the reasonable male legal subject. Furthermore, battered women’s lives are considered even more extraordinary because of the historically persistent denial of the extent and the severity of domestic abuse (Naffine, 1995: 35). Donald Downs claims that the BWS narrative gained popularity in courtrooms so quickly because it reflected dominant social norms with which the legal system was already comfortable (1996: 106),20 providing legal and medical credibility for stereotypes about women’s passivity, masochism and their intrinsic responsibility for domestic abuse (Stubbs and Tolmie, 1994: 211). BWS testimony further appealed to the judiciary and legal personnel because it gave them an illusion of cast-iron premises upon which to found a picture of who a battered woman truly is. This is a very dangerous situation for battered women. For, as Donald Downs observes: if an abused woman’s responses in the relationship [do] not conform exactly to the legal stereotype of a woman suffering from battered woman syndrome, courts [can] find her, by definition, to be neither battered nor reasonable. (1996: 11) The campaign to allow BWS evidence into court may well have begun with the best of intentions, then, but the theory now seems to be fast becoming a straitjacket which tries to confine the realities of battered women and domestic violence within rigid parameters which do little to challenge society’s, or the law’s, understandings of spousal abuse, women’s violence, female agency and femininity itself. In the final analysis, BWS remains an ‘abuse excuse’ which, as Joan Cocks has observed of victim discourses in general, corrupts the Hegelian master/slave relation on which it is based through denying the victim’s capacity for action and gaining ‘moral purchase through endless recitation of slaves’ suffering’ (1991: 152). The discourse of the masters is no longer challenged, as the victimized merely appeal for reparation, not change, from those who dominate them. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note, as Cocks does, that the victims’ very texts demanding reparation are written in militant voices which paradoxically argue their victimhood at the very time they are declaring themselves to be anything but victims (1991: 153).

The killings This section will compare and contrast the cases of Mrs R., Pamela Sainsbury and Erika Kontinnen, analysing their use of the defence laws for homicide and the understandings of battered women and domestic violence invoked in both court and media narratives throughout their trials. The case of Mrs R. shows legal endeavours to narrate the incomprehensible and, in doing so, highlights the legal reliance on myth and stereotype to fill the


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void created by wilful blindness. The case also portrays a moment when the symbiosis between law and media broke down, and public dissatisfaction demanded ‘the Law’ question its own tenets and its applicability for battered women. Pamela Sainsbury’s case offers a view of the ways in which the English legal system negotiated cases where battered women killed abusive partners by allowing evidence of battering and its effects on the female victim, while disallowing BWS testimony. The Sainsbury case arrived on the heels of the high-profile cases R v Thornton and R v Ahluwahlia,21 which both debated the admissibility of evidence of battering and BWS. The defendants in the Thornton and Ahluwahlia cases were initially convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. The Sainsbury verdict of manslaughter and sentence of two years probation was considered crucial to the appeals in these earlier cases because it indicated a change in judicial thinking regarding this sort of crime (Frost, 14.12.91; Weale, 14.12.91; Evening Herald [Plymouth], 14.12.91). Shortly after the conclusion of the Sainsbury case in December 1991, BWS evidence was admitted for the first time in England. The case of Erika Kontinnen is worthy of study primarily because its admission of BWS evidence highlights both the advantages and the disadvantages of the use of this testimony in court. In this case, BWS testimony had the practical result of gaining Kontinnen an acquittal, but it also necessitated a carefully moulded representation fitting the image prescribed for BWS sufferers by the courts, if not by Lenore Walker. This discussion of these three cases is principally concerned to analyse the similarities between the various stories emanating from the mainstream law and media, and to question whether feminist legal intervention in the last two cases has improved the potential for women to receive agentic representation. The ‘facts’22 RvR In suburban Adelaide, at approximately 2.42 am on 2 April 1981, Mrs R. killed her husband, who was sleeping in the matrimonial bed, by striking his head and neck eleven times with an axe. Ten minutes after the homicide Mrs R. rang the police emergency number and confessed to the killing. She was arrested and charged with murder later that morning. Her first trial began on 14 July 1981 and resulted in a murder conviction and a sentence of life imprisonment due to her lack of a legally admissible defence. Her children, defence team and many sympathetic politicians and women’s organizations immediately orchestrated a public campaign to gain her release and a retrial. On 21 July 1981 Mrs R. was released on bail. Her appeal against her conviction and request for a retrial were upheld on 15 October 1981 on the grounds that the trial judge erred in denying her the defence of provocation.

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On 26 November 1981, at the conclusion of her second trial, she was found not guilty of any crime. Legal theorists often cite this verdict as an example of a ‘perverse verdict’, which means that the jury acquitted her without any legally admissible evidence which would have justified their decision. R v Sainsbury In the early hours of 29 September 1990 Pamela Sainsbury of Sidmouth, Devon, throttled her sleeping husband, Paul Sainsbury, with a plumb line taken from his toolbox which she tied to a bed castor and then pulled around his neck. At first, she placed his body in a wardrobe, then two days later dismembered it at night while her two children slept, cutting his legs, arms and head from his torso and placing the pieces into five garbage bags. Over the next couple of nights she dumped all the bags, except the one containing the head, 250 metres away in a hedge in a field. She kept the head in the meter cupboard for seven months, eventually putting it and the saw used to cut up the body out with the garbage. Neither head nor saw have ever been found. The rest of the body was found eight months after the killing because Pamela finally admitted to a friend in June 1991 that she had killed her husband and the friend informed the police. At her trial on 13 December 1991 Pamela’s plea of guilty to manslaughter due to diminished responsibility was accepted after four psychiatrists gave evidence in support. Kontinnen v Queen On Monday 28 January 1991, at around 3.30 am, Erika Kontinnen shot her de facto husband, Edward Hill, once through the head with a rifle while he slept in their outer suburban house in Adelaide. She then left the house with Hill’s other de facto wife, Olga Runjanjic, and their son Archie, both of whom had been asleep at the time of the killing. The three drove to a friend’s house and Erika confessed to the murder. The friend went with the two to the police at 7.35 am, where Erika stated that there had been an accident involving a gun. The police accompanied Erika to the house and ascertained that Hill was dead. She was charged with murder later that day and both women were attended by a medical practitioner at the police station for injuries sustained prior to the shooting. Her trial began at the Adelaide Supreme Court on 18 March 1992 and concluded with her acquittal on 30 March 1992. ‘Family life’ The tales of Mrs R. and her children The murder stories of Mrs R. and her children began in media res, focusing on the horrendous details of this twenty-seven year marriage ending in


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homicide, rather than following traditional legal narrative structure and stressing the immediate events attending the crime. Mr R. was presented in these tales as an openly unfaithful husband with a violent and unpredictable temper whose resentment of fatherhood made him callous and cruel to his wife, particularly during her pregnancies. He physically and psychologically abused his family continuously, causing them injuries including strangulation, stabbing, concussion, broken noses, fractured skulls, burns and scalds. In most cases he did not allow them to seek medical treatment, relying instead on the ministrations of Mrs R., who was a trained nurse. All five daughters also endured years of their father’s sexual abuse, which was kept secret from their mother as she worked as a night nurse throughout the majority of her marriage. Their father forced his daughters to perform oral and anal sex with him, have sex with each other and use broomsticks as dildos while he watched, beating them if they demurred. Frequently, he assaulted them while holding loaded guns to their heads or knives to their throats. They were terrorized into silence as much by his continual and excessive physical violence as by his threats of death should they enlighten their mother. By all accounts Mrs R. was a very different person from her husband. Her children claimed she was ‘one of the best mothers anyone could think of’ (English, 18.7.81) and considered her no match for her brutal partner. In all respects she was the ideal mother, he the monstrous father, her exemplariness extending even to murder. Mrs R. was convinced of her husband’s sexual abuse of her daughters only in the sixteen hours preceding the murder. The catalyst for this revelation lay in her two eldest daughters’ plans to leave home and move to Melbourne. She supported these plans, but although the girls were in their twenties, their father did not. His severe abuse of them over several days prior to his death culminated in an attack on the second daughter in which her hand was badly cut and her face bruised. While bandaging her daughter’s hand, Mrs R. made the first of many threats against her husband’s life, telling her daughter she would kill him for hurting her hand. Mrs R.’s plan to murder did not gain real surety, however, until her second daughter enlightened her of the girls’ sexual abuse. These revelations so horrified her that she appeared dazed and detached to all who saw her for the rest of the day. Upon her return from work at around 9 pm, her husband, still unaware of his wife’s new-found knowledge, attempted uncharacteristically to be pleasant to her, stating: ‘ “We [the girls and himself] settled our differences. We are going to be one big happy family. There isn’t going to be no more talk about the girls leaving home.”’ (R v R, 16.7.81). Later, when they were in bed, he put his arms around her, saying: ‘ “We are going to be happy [name suppressed]. I love you.”’ (R v R, 16.7.81). He then mentioned the possibility of a second honeymoon. Mrs R. pushed him away and he went to sleep. Unable to bear lying beside him, she sat on the end of the bed for around twenty to twenty-five minutes smoking cigarettes and reflecting on her

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daughter’s revelations. Finally, she decided murder represented the only solution to her predicament as he would certainly kill her were he to discover the revelation of his secret and would never leave her family alone, even if they refused to live with him. Mrs R.’s arresting police officer stated at the first trial that she had explained her actions at the time thus: ‘ “It was a terrible life that he gave us and he treated the girls like that. I could not stand it any longer. I had to do it. It’s all over with now and we can have a peaceful life. He deserved it; he had it coming to him. I couldn’t let him do that to the girls any longer.” ’ (R v R, 16.7.81). The children remained in complete support of their mother throughout the trials and appeal. From their perspective, punishment was not warranted in their mother’s case. Rather, Mrs R.’s actions were appropriate given her family’s hellish reality and required assessment on standards other than conventional understandings of home and family. The Sydney Morning Herald reported the views of one of the daughters thus: ‘’No one can know what it’s like to live with the kind of fear we experienced every day of our lives. … People can’t believe the sort of hell we lived through.” (Oudtshoorn, 22.7.81). Pamela’s story Pamela Sainsbury met her builder husband, Paul, while on holiday in Devon in 1982. She came to live with him in his home town of Sidmouth later that year, and gave birth to their daughter in 1983. Paul Sainsbury always demonstrated extreme jealousy of his wife’s attentions, slapping her face if she even looked at another man. After the birth of their son in 1986 the relationship soured further. Paul Sainsbury became what his wife’s defending counsel Helena Kennedy later described as a tyrannical sadist engaged in the domination and torture of his wife. He forced her to eat like an animal from a bowl on the floor and to wear a collar and leash; he whipped her with a cane, kicked, punched and stabbed her with pencils; he forced her to perform degrading sexual acts and to pose in degrading sexual positions for photographs; he often woke her at night in order to beat her; and he kept her a prisoner in their home, denying her contact with friends and family. He would also beat her if she used any words he did not understand, as he felt threatened by the fact that her education exceeded his. By the time of the killing Pamela Sainsbury spoke only in monosyllables. The violence was almost daily at the end of their relationship, as were his demands that she perform sexual indignities. Pamela claimed she did not walk out on him because she feared for her children and because she was scared he would follow her. He had threatened to burn down her parents’ home and to show friends the photographs he had made her pose for if she left him. On the night of the murder the couple went out drinking at a nightclub. When they returned home, Paul gave Pamela a two-hour beating because she had casually spoken to another man while at the club. When he finally


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went to sleep, she took a nylon plumb line from his toolbox, affixed one end of it to a bed castor and pulled it so tightly around his neck that her hands still bore the scars fifteen months later at her trial. She told detectives that at the time of the killing she ‘ “didn’t mean to kill him but … couldn’t stop [her]self from pulling” ’ (Lakeman, 14.12.91a), and that she felt ‘ “it was either him or me. I couldn’t take it any more.” ’ (Chapple, 14.12.91). After hiding his body in the wardrobe, Pamela wrote on her calendar at 4 am on 29 September: ‘ “This is the first day of the rest of my life.” ’ (Bishop, 14.12.91). She spent the next couple of days explaining to family and friends that her husband had beaten her again and had moved away to avoid police involvement. At night she dismembered Paul’s body and dumped most of the pieces. She informed investigating police that she had intended to bury the pieces in her back garden, but the ground was too hard. She kept the head in the meter cupboard until May of the following year, claiming she used it to remind herself that Paul really was dead. Pamela’s lifestyle changed quite dramatically after Paul’s demise, as she now busied herself going out to clubs and pubs and ‘even found romance with two or three boyfriends’ (Bishop, 14.12.91). Paul was reported missing by his brother in October 1990, but the police did not become suspicious of Pamela until the following May when they discovered she had attempted to transfer Paul’s bank account to her name. Upon realizing that police inquiries were to continue, Pamela promptly got rid of the head and saw. According to one of her lovers, Pamela confessed her deed in January when he had noticed a terrible smell in her house and was informed: ‘ “Oh, that’s the head, I must get rid of it.” ’ (Kerr, 15.12.91). Unable to cope with her confidences, he broke off his relationship with Pamela but failed to notify police. She was only arrested after she confessed the murder to a friend and revealed her husband’s remains. Erika and Olga’s story The story Erika and Olga told of their time with Edward Hill contained so many graphic accounts of almost unimaginable violence and injuries inflicted on them, and on Olga’s son Archie, that they appeared lucky to have survived at all. Olga had been with Hill for ten years prior to the shooting and had endured by far the worst of the assaults. Hill hit both women with dumbbells, steel bars, pieces of wood, coffee tables, beds, sticks, brooms, rocks, garden hoses, baseball bats and, less frequently, with his fists. Olga was battered on a daily basis, while Erika was beaten several times each week during her four years in the relationship. Olga suffered injuries including a laceration infected with maggots, damage to her spleen and pancreas causing their removal, a collapsed lung and liver, a broken arm and nose, a cauliflower ear and a fracture in the cavity of her right eye producing double vision and severe headaches. Erika’s catalogue of afflictions

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included a broken jaw, cracked ribs, severe bruising and a knife wound to the head. Although cognizant of the situation, neither hospital staff nor police instigated charges against Hill or attempted to persuade the women to do so. Indeed, their lack of interest in the women’s plight even extended to injuries sustained by the child. Hill attempted to drown his son, threw him across the room and bruised his face badly. When contacted, the police were reluctant to intervene and, according to Erika’s testimony, on several occasions refused to attend the house during episodes of violent child assault allegedly because they were scared of Hill (R v Kontinnen, 30.3.92). Hill insisted the women perform all domestic work as well as labour in the wood business, phone sex line and prostitution/escort service owned by the trio. In addition, the women’s use of the television, food consumption, amount of sleep and money were rationed. Hill had no compunction about beating the women in front of others and, so Olga claimed, referred constantly to them as ‘slags and molls and sluts’ (R v Kontinnen, 30.3.92). He frequently had visitors to the house, yet none of these guests ever dared speak to him about his treatment of his family nor attempted to help the women. Erika and Olga claimed to be terrified of him, yet also to love him, even up until, and indeed after, the night of the killing. Caroline Milburn, for instance, began her post-trial story on Erika with these words: ‘On a hot January night in Adelaide, Erika Kontinnen shot her defacto husband – the man who forced her to become a prostitute, the man who liked to wear steelcapped boots when he kicked her in the stomach, the man she still loves.’ (18.4.92). Erika and Olga were unable to tell a coherent tale of the murder. Olga had been asleep at the time, while Erika could not remember either the actual shooting itself or what happened immediately before it. Both women agreed that the Sunday prior to the killing had been very difficult, beginning with Hill beating Olga badly with a stick as soon as he woke. Although visitors were at the house for most of the day, the tension between the women and Hill remained. After the guests left around midnight, Hill forced Erika to stand in a corner of their bedroom for over an hour, throwing a boot at her at one time to make her stand up straight. When Olga went to Archie’s bedroom to sleep, Hill grabbed Erika by the hair, threw her on the bed and started beating her with his fists across her head and chest. Finally, he pushed her off the bed and told her very quietly: ‘ “I’m tired. I’m going to sleep and all yous [sic] [Erika, Olga and Archie] will be dead when I wake up” ’ (R v Kontinnen, 30.3.92). Erika had reason to believe he meant what he said as the level of violence had escalated in the last few weeks and he had spoken in the soft voice he used to indicate the seriousness of threats. Approximately two and a half hours later Erika shot Hill once through the head, checked that he was injured, collected Olga and Archie and left the house. The next morning Erika went to the police and reported having heard a shot fired. The police escorted her to the house but refused to enter it to see


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if Hill was alive. They insisted that Erika, who had no front door keys, climb through the bathroom window and check for herself, as, according to Erika’s testimony, they could not put themselves into ‘that sort of danger’ because they ‘did not know what they were walking into’ (R v Kontinnen, 30.3.92). Erika ascertained that Hill was dead and confessed to murder later that day, claiming that she did not go to the police as soon as she had shot Hill because she was not entirely sure that he was dead. Prosecution tales The law of self-defence, as it was formulated in 1981, could not and did not accommodate Mrs R.’s act of killing. The victim was asleep at the time and the law of self-defence decreed that he was therefore defenceless and could not immediately endanger the life of another (Scutt, 1983: 188–9). Mrs R.’s experience of extreme and ongoing abuse simply did not tally with the experiences men might have which could cause them to kill to defend themselves. Indeed, her experience was so far outside that which legal discourse accepted from (male) defendants that at her first trial she was left without a legal defence at all. Even at the second her actions explicitly placed her outside the understanding of the legal system through the jury’s ‘perverse’ verdict (Harding, 1989: 40). The prosecution’s understanding of the defences to homicide was instrumental in hampering Mrs R.’s use of them. For they insisted that because she killed her husband deliberately, knowingly and intentionally, she had committed murder rather than manslaughter or self-defence. A desire for freedom and a need to protect one’s children from further abuse were not considered acceptable excuses for deliberately killing someone. This self-same argument was used again in the Kontinnen trial ten years later, where the Crown claimed that Erika, like Mrs R., did not act in selfdefence because Hill, like Mr R., was asleep at the time and had been for some two-and-a-half hours. This time lag before the killing indicated further, as it had for the prosecution in the R. case, that neither could Erika have acted out of sudden passion due to immediate provocation. Instead, on the prosecution’s account, Erika, in a direct mirroring of the prosecution’s claims regarding Mrs R., used this time to plan the murder and afterwards feigned memory loss to cover her tracks. The prosecution in the Sainsbury case entirely avoided arguments about whether the defendant had committed murder or manslaughter, or acted in self-defence, by reaching agreement that Pamela would be allowed to plead guilty on the basis of diminished responsibility. This meant that the time lag, which was also present in her case between the conclusion of the beating and the killing, was not relevant. Pleas of diminished responsibility usually take the length of time necessary both to develop and to rid oneself of a mental abnormality into account through the psychiatric care orders in which they often result.

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All three prosecution narratives were sympathetic to the women, even while they argued the necessity of punishment. In all cases, the prosecution agreed that the murdered abusers behaved abominably to their wives, subjecting them to inhumane and intolerable treatment. Yet, in their reliance on very traditional understandings of marriage and family relationships, each woman was still made to shoulder some of the blame for her unfortunate situation. In Mrs R.’s case the prosecution held the view that, while she evidently loved her children, she did not take adequate protective measures towards them throughout the twenty-seven years of her marriage. The revelations from her second daughter regarding sexual abuse were supposedly a complete surprise to her, yet she also admitted that she had long held suspicions regarding her husband’s behaviour and on several occasions had received proof of his incestuous activities. In any case, even were her suspicions not aroused regarding possible sexual abuse, the prosecution pointed out that the situation in the R. house was appalling enough to cause her to leave, yet she did not. Pamela Sainsbury was asked to explain why she, too, did not leave her home. Her explanation that she was terrified her husband would find her and kill her or injure her family was allowed to stand, largely because her plea of diminished responsibility meant that she was considered not to have been behaving normally in any event. Erika Kontinnen, who, like Mrs R., pleaded provocation and self-defence, received harsher treatment. The prosecution claimed that her story that she killed Hill out of terror and desperation was inconsistent and prone to exaggeration. Their narrative insisted that she chose not to escape from Hill on the night in question because she, like her predecessor Mrs R., had determined he deserved to die. On this account, Erika fabricated stories about an increase in violence immediately preceding the killing, relying upon a very selective memory which was clear and accurate at all times except for the period surrounding the shooting. Far from being ‘forced’ to kill Hill, then, according to the Crown, Erika, like Mrs R., rejected every opportunity to escape. The theme of vengefulness on the part of the women is present in all three prosecution narratives. Mrs R. was presented as a victimized woman who acted inappropriately to end a dire situation due to her desire for revenge. Erika Kontinnen was considered to have killed Hill deliberately and intentionally out of revenge for the suffering she, Olga and Archie had endured. In the Sainsbury case the prosecution argued that the sheer strength it took for Pamela Sainsbury to hold the rope tight against her husband’s throat indicated a desire for revenge rather than her desperation. Furthermore, her lack of remorse for her act was immediately apparent in her hiding of the body in the wardrobe and writing on her calendar: ‘This is the first day of the rest of my life.’ Her avoidance of detection through dismemberment of the body, telling lies to her friends and family about


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what had happened to Paul, and her lifestyle after the killing also did not suggest regret for her acts. All three women, then, were castigated for their vengefulness, regardless of the circumstances which had produced it. Although relatively common,23 husband murder has long been considered a more serious crime than wife murder,24 which, as these three prosecution narratives show us, means that battered women who kill their abusers need more explanation than do husbands who kill their wives. Certainly, the prosecution narrative in the R. case fell into the trap of suggesting that Mrs R. bore some responsibility for her husband’s outrageous behaviour. Like many battered women before and after her, Mrs R. was considered accountable for her inability to leave, the frequency and severity of the beatings, her inability to get help, and finally for her desperate and fatal solution. No cognizance of social and judicial attitudes militating against her attempts to find other peaceable solutions is evident here. Instead, she is criticized for not seeking help because she didn’t want others to know of her predicament. No acknowledgement is made regarding Western heteropatriarchy’s allegiance to the doctrine of the public/private split which supported her decision to keep the affairs of home and family private. Furthermore, the prosecution resolutely muffled any suggestion that public authorities might not have provided aid, even if she had ‘aired her dirty laundry’. The influence of feminist understandings of domestic violence and battered women was evident in the Sainsbury case. Although Pamela did have to explain why she didn’t leave her abusive husband, she appears not to have been interrogated as to why she apparently did not seek help for either herself or her children from social welfare agencies during her eight years of marriage. This omission, coupled with the psychiatrists’ unanimous decision that Pamela Sainsbury was suffering from ‘an acute stress reaction’ at the time of the killing, indicated a major shift in legal thinking regarding these cases in Britain. Pamela Sainsbury remains a quintessential victim in the prosecution narrative: victimized into performing an act which, as she explained to police, she didn’t want to perform but could not stop herself from enacting (Lakeman, 14.12.91a). Her hands pulling on the rope that garrotted her husband take on a life of their own, becoming an irresistible force of nature rather than the tools of an intentional and justifiable homicide. Instead of reasonably protecting herself and her children from the sadism of Paul Sainsbury, then, Pamela instead killed her husband because she was too stressed to think of another alternative. Once she had done so, she did what any efficient housewife would do – tidied up the mess and returned to the calm life she had led before meeting Sainsbury. Her act was thus a thoughtless, abhorrent aberration brought about by the victim’s behaviour, not an act of courage and determination to regain control of her destiny. The Kontinnen case differed from that of Mrs R. and Sainsbury in its inclusion of BWS evidence. Indeed, the legal tales of this case concentrated

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primarily on whether or not Erika had developed the symptoms of BWS. The Crown averred that BWS is not a necessary consequence of severe battering, and supported this contention with the argument that the women’s living situation did not parallel exactly the parameters of those violent situations featuring BWS studied by Lenore Walker and others. Their ménage-à-trois relationship, plentiful visitors, lack of social isolation, access to a kitty jar containing loose change, Hill’s openly acknowledged and performed violence, his absence from the women’s permanent residence for part of each week, and Erika’s prior knowledge of his violence before moving into his house, all suggested, in the prosecution’s opinion, that the women lacked the conditions necessary to produce BWS. The dangers of mobilizing BWS testimony are here made apparent. Due to Erika’s lack of fit with the characteristics of the standard ‘deserving’ victim, being working class, unmarried and in an unconventional relationship, her symptoms of BWS were thus also open to challenge. Erika, like Mrs R. before her, was not, in the prosecution’s opinion, forced to kill. Due to their attempts to plead self-defence, the impossibility of their situations was challenged at every opportunity by the Crown. Pamela Sainsbury, on the other hand, was allowed this ‘explanation’ of her behaviour because her plea of diminished responsibility had already pathologized her and made void any claims alleging the possible rationality of her killing. Defence tales In cases where battered women kill, the defence, like the prosecution, often invokes very traditional understandings of marriage and family. The defence in both the Mrs R. and Sainsbury cases presented their clients as ‘good’ wives who merely tried too hard to make their relationships with their abusive husbands work. Even though Mrs R. had threatened her husband’s life prior to the killing, this indicated only her increasing desperation and her need of help. Her decision that he really must die was taken only after she received confirmation of his sexual abuse of all her children. In the light of this knowledge, Mr R.’s final words to Mrs R., ‘I love you’, were so cruel that, added to the years of cumulative provocation she had already undergone, they provoked the gentle Mrs R. to murder. Pamela Sainsbury, like Mrs R., was a perfect fit for the mantle of ‘good’ motherhood and victimized wifehood. Her defence counsel and the four psychiatrists called to give evidence as to her mental state described her in glowing terms as intelligent, happy, gentle, well educated, faithful, bonnie, bright and attractive. Her photograph in the newspapers depicted a pretty, blond woman, conservatively dressed, smiling uncertainly at the cameras. Her two children, like Mrs R.’s six, were claimed to be her ‘salvation’ as she negotiated the dreadful years of her marriage to their psychopathic, sadistic father. Far from being a calculating killer, Pamela was a hostage who, having freed herself, would now require the same kind of counselling that all


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hostage victims need. Even the judge in her case concurred with this assessment. In his opinion, not only had she been forced to kill her husband, but she had then endured the ‘dreadful trauma’ of having her deed discovered (Guardian, 14.12.91)! Paul Sainsbury was thus the architect of his own destruction, as in the judge’s terms he was a ‘violent, jealous, psychopathic man’ (Daily Mail Reporter, 14.12.91). This does not mean, however, that Pamela was any more rational in her killing than was Mrs R. Instead, she was presented as psychologically numbed, on automatic pilot and in a dream-like state when she killed, having developed a mental illness due to years of cruel treatment (Stokes, 14.12.91). Although both women suffered shocking torment, then, the straitjacket of ‘good’ womanhood demanded that, even in their most tortured state, they must not act rationally to save themselves. Rather, Mrs R. must become blindly furious, and Pamela Sainsbury must develop an abnormality of mind, to allow them to take self-regarding action. The defence narrative in the Kontinnen case eschewed the stereotypes of good wife and motherhood on which the other defence teams relied, presumably because Erika’s unconventional living arrangements disallowed such a presentation. The catalogue of horrors she suffered, however, gave her good reasons for ending her torment. But she was far from being a cold-blooded revenge killer. Erika’s defence insisted that ‘there are occasions where people are entitled to protect themselves from brutal attacks from their spouses’ (Bevan, 31.3.92). These are, nevertheless, very specific occasions. In Erika’s case, they were caused by her development of BWS. According to her psychiatrist, Dr Marusczyk, Erika possessed every one of the characteristics of BWS. Marusczyk explained that Erika’s reasons for remaining with Hill and accepting his battering were exacerbated due to Hill’s rationing of her food and sleep, which caused her to become both physically and emotionally run down. Her clinical psychologist, Alan Fugler, agreed, adding that Erika was unable to escape in the last weeks before the killing because the violence escalated during this period which further frightened and disheartened her. Although Hill was uncharacteristically open about his brutality, in Fugler’s estimation this openness may have made the women’s situation more difficult than it might have been in a domestically violent relationship in which the violence was hidden. Certainly, in Fugler’s opinion, it convinced both women that there was no safe place and no escape from Hill. Erika’s murder of Hill was seen to be characteristic of battered women, as one of the features of BWS is the capacity to suddenly snap and commit suicide or murder the batterer after experiencing swiftly escalating desperation due to the extent of the violence and the lack of escape options. Fugler’s argument implies a strong critique of society, which was occluded at Erika’s trial. For women who kill their batterers, so he implicitly argues, have lost faith in the provision of outside help. As Zoe Rathus has observed, these women have often tried to leave and been unsuccessful, they

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have experienced the failure of restraining orders and police intervention to end their abuse, they have watched their partners abuse their children, and they are thus left without any options except either to continue to live with the abuse and face the real possibility of their own murder, or to resort to murder themselves (cited in Manning, 1996: 8). Far from demonstrating learned helplessness, as part of BWS, Erika, then, as Robert Schopp claims, was apparently one of the women who didn’t develop this trait because she clearly retained a sense of her responsibility to change an intolerable situation (1998: 97). Rather than arguing this line, however, Erika’s defence preferred to give centre stage to the incapacitating aspects of BWS, particularly the abnormal thought patterns it supposedly causes. The ten years which elapsed between Mrs R.’s murder of her husband and Pamela Sainsbury’s and Erika Kontinnen’s killings of their partners can be seen to have wrought few changes in the attitudes of defence and prosecution counsels towards such cases. The prosecution in all instances relied on traditional understandings of home and family to argue its line that intentional murders must be punished regardless of contexts and histories; while the defence necessarily reacted more sympathetically to women they viewed, also through rather conventional ideas of marriage, as victims of circumstances. The only major change that has occurred across this decade, then, is the defence’s increased ability to prove battery and to argue that murder, provided the woman suffers from BWS or diminished responsibility, is a predictable, if extreme, solution to gross abuse. Newspaper narratives The press in all three cases was overwhelmingly sympathetic to the women. In the latter cases, press stories followed the defence portrayal closely, mirroring the dependence on discourses of irrationality, whether diminished responsibility or BWS, to explain the need for compassion. In Mrs R.’s case, however, the press chose to follow Mrs R.’s own narrative, which had slipped through the cracks in both prosecution and defence tales. Rather than accepting the defence’s allegations that she had ‘lost control’, for instance, during her first trial the press asserted Mrs R.’s own story that she felt she had to kill her husband to ‘free her family’ (Advertiser, 16.7.81). Reports describing how her children ‘burst into tears, the jurors wept, and one of her daughters was so distressed she had to be helped from the court’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 17.7.81) when the verdict of guilty was handed down betray the media’s own metaphoric weeping at her ill-deserved fate. Fortified by the defence’s assertion that an appeal would be lodged, the press then undertook an extraordinary campaign to free Mrs R. and gain her a second trial. The major theme of this successful campaign was that if only help had been available, the tragedy of Mrs R. would never have occurred. Government welfare authorities attacked this premise and a dispute ensued over whether or not the R. family had actively sought help. The conflict


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between the defence and prosecution understandings of this case was plainly mirrored in the playing out of this argument. The government groups placed the onus of responsibility firmly on the shoulders of the woman and children involved in the case, stating that help had always been available if the family had wanted or asked for it. According to this argument, abuse within home and family remained sacrosanct unless victims came to their own defence and publicly condemned those who harmed them. The R. supporters, on the other hand, insisted upon an explosion of the concept of privacy, claiming that external intervention would have prevented Mrs R.’s tragic response to an increasingly desperate and alienated situation. Rather than blame the victims in the case, in the supporters’ opinion, the authorities would have done better to have made more of an attempt to understand the politics of oppression and to have created procedures designed to circumvent the tyranny exercised by batterers. The press remained compassionate throughout Mrs R.’s second trial, and did not attempt to hide their glee at her eventual acquittal. The potentially revolutionary possibilities of this newspaper narrative, which uncharacteristically pitted community outrage and sympathy for a female killer against legal process, returned to its more usual conservatism, however, once the trial was over. Mrs R.’s professed desire to slip back into anonymity, to ‘forget Adelaide and all its bad memories’ (English, 27.11.81), was allowed to serve as a fitting end to a dreadful episode in Adelaide’s legal and social history. Newspaper coverage of the Sainsbury case concentrated almost exclusively on the extreme differences apparent between Pamela and Paul Sainsbury. The two were depicted as having come from such different backgrounds that there was little hope of understanding between them. She came from a stable, loving, middle-class London family who wanted her to pursue a career as a scientist (Chapple, 14.12.91), while he was a manual labourer who grew up on a council estate and had exhibited obsessive behaviour towards women even while in his teens (Western Morning News, 14.12.91). His attraction for her in their early years of marriage was dismissed as ‘infatuation’, while his interest in her was considered a far more ominous ‘obsession’ (Daily Mail Reporter, 14.12.91). Evidently, so the story goes, Pamela Sainsbury fell briefly in love with the wrong kind of man and became trapped, eventually being forced into an extreme solution to her predicament. Their class and personal differences were emphasized at every opportunity. She was a ‘former school prefect’ (Lakeman, 14.12.91b) with good school grades; he was ‘the sort of man who made your flesh crawl’ (Lakeman, 14.12.91b). She was bright and intelligent; he was volatile and so incensed by her education that he beat her if she spoke in words of more than two syllables. He was a brute who treated her like a dog; her friends were delighted when she finally walked free after having garrotted him with one of his own nylon cords (Kerr, 15.12.91). Her children were all important to

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her, and at the conclusion of her trial she stated that all she now desired was a new start and a quiet life with her family (Frost, 14.12.91). Their father, on the other hand, died in part because he had threatened to harm his children, should Pamela attempt to leave him (Bishop, 14.12.91). No clearer portrait of victim and victimizer could be drawn. Anomalies, such as that Pamela showed no remorse for her act and, more importantly, that the victimizer ultimately became the victim, were glossed over in these accounts in favour of a bizarre, yet comforting, tale of a ‘good’ woman who finally divested herself of a ‘bad’ man. Erika Kontinnen was also presented as an ‘ordinary’ woman who became involved with an incredibly evil man. Although the main theme of the articles, as in the R. case, was an insistence that the violence should have been stopped by outside authorities, Erika was nevertheless considered to have only taken such drastic action because she developed BWS. She, like Pamela Sainsbury, killed out of desperation, without being entirely aware of her actions or their consequences. Portrayals like these perform two purposes. First, they make apparent the pivotal importance battering relationships can assume in considerations of privacy in the modern West. For the battered woman’s body can literally represent the ‘carnal ground’ (Hatty, 1989: 71) over which is fought the seemingly irresolvable affray between traditional concepts and more recent feminist ideas of what privacy is and how it might operate. Second, they demonstrate the ways in which the press sutures over the rifts such cases cause in the social fabric. Mrs R.’s case, for instance, ends with her disappearance to a more tranquil life, away from her ‘bad memories’. Its importance as a moment when the defence laws were rendered inadequate and inappropriate and the bankruptcy of the doctrine of the public/private split was revealed thus fades, allowing it to become merely another freakish event lacking educative power and best forgotten. Likewise, Pamela Sainsbury vanished into anonymity, having ‘already served her sentence – eight years of being with Paul’ (Kerr, 15.12.91). These words seal over any general instructive response regarding the unacceptability of domestic violence, permitting the audience to step neatly back into a realm where stories like hers are merely bizarre, rather than depicting the extreme end of a continuum of allowable domestically violent behaviour from men in Western societies. Erika Kontinnen’s case, too, underwent this same process of neutralization and naturalization, with the final stories on the case depicting it as merely another horror story involving a deluded woman and a diabolical man.

Responsible agents or forced to kill? Issues of rationality and agency were central to the cases of Mrs R., Pamela Sainsbury and Erika Kontinnen as they all ultimately concentrated upon whether or not the female protagonists were in control of their actions on the night of the killings. Mrs R.’s agency was problematic for her defence


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primarily because she lacked a legally admissible narrative through which to narrate it. As Julia Tolmie has stated, her actions fell into a ‘hiatus in the law between the defence of provocation and that of self defence’ (1990: 64–5). Her defence chose to take the less radical path and argued the defence of provocation, although this defence merely reasserted traditional stereotypes of women in its alignment of Mrs R. with irrationality and loss of control. Indeed, this irrationality extended even to the defence’s anomalous manipulation of the events of the case. For provocation doctrine at the time contained no admissible concept of cumulative provocation, which meant that the defence could allow Mrs R.’s history of violence and abuse ‘no direct, independent meaning’ (Tarrant, 1990: 150, emphasis in original). Instead, the law’s insistence upon the immediacy requirement meant that the defence had to use this history as mere context for their claim that Mr R.’s final words before sleep, when he had told his wife he loved her, constituted provocation. The extremely narrow parameters and the explicit masculinist bias of the defence of provocation meant, then, that Mrs R.’s acts were legally indefensible unless they were portrayed as doubly irrational, first via the usage of the defence of provocation itself and second in terms of the trivial nature of the provocation alleged to have caused her to lose control. Mrs R.’s release as the result of a ‘perverse verdict’ demonstrates the jury’s, and the community’s, displeasure with both defence and prosecution narratives of the case. In reaching their unusual verdict, the jury was forced to rely upon contextual and other mitigating factors operating in Mrs R.’s extra-legal defence, rather than on legal argument. Zoe Rathus states that this verdict represented the only compassionate course the jury could take, faced as it was with a mass of artificial legal limitations and a case which clearly exceeded existing legal boundaries, thus demanding a fresh approach to the dispensation of justice (Rathus, 1989: 41). It is interesting to reflect here on Derrida’s analysis of ‘fresh judgement’ (1992: 23) discussed in Chapter 2. In their disregard of existing legal criteria, the jury can be seen as satisfying the conditions Derrida highlights whereby the law’s usual commitment to the application of rules and regulations is surpassed in favour of an attempt to approach the more far-reaching, if aporetic, concept of legal justice (1992: 16). However, and perhaps because of their endeavour to provide justice, the jury’s apparent lack of regard for legal principles meant that their verdict cannot count as a triumph for the law. Instead, as Jocelynne Scutt observes, it was rather a victory for community common sense (1983: 190). More importantly, though, this case provides a rare occasion when a woman’s agency was not just allowed, but celebrated. Mrs R.’s perverse verdict, while legally tragic, attests to her community’s ability to appreciate her agency and to accept her justifications for acting as she did. Ultimately, then, the community vindicated her where the law could not. In Pamela Sainsbury’s case, legal, and especially judicial, sympathy for her obscured the events which took place after the homicide. This was

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fortuitous as they demonstrated a fairly determined effort on Pamela’s part not to be discovered as her husband’s killer. Her agency was, thus, muted, ignored, in favour of the more ‘feminine’ explanation that she lacked responsibility. This defence is common for battered women in Britain, as a way to avoid the mandatory life sentence of a murder conviction. Yet, it also fits in neatly with the prevailing stereotypes of ‘good’ womanhood as passive, unknowing, diminished, compared to manhood and masculinity. The denial of equal citizenship, in terms of the rights and responsibilities of both citizen and state, is explicit in the coding of the defence of diminished responsibility. For while we expect women to be lesser citizens, and to lack full responsibility for their acts, we also allow the state to do less to protect them from harm. Erika Kontinnen’s defence was, likewise, very conservative in its usage of BWS testimony to support her primary claim of provocation. For although she also alleged self-defence, her reliance on BWS testimony obscured the impact of this more agentic explanation. Indeed, self-defence constituted only a background context to the defence’s narrative of the homicide. Erika’s story of having been forced to kill due to a literal lack of options was, however, glossed over by her defence, who argued that her inability to perceive the legitimate alternatives available to her left her no choice. Erika’s killing of Edward Hill only becomes rational and justified under this discourse because it was performed by ‘someone possessing a particular cluster of psychological symptoms’ (Stubbs, 1992: 360). This assertion echoes, indeed repeats, that made on Pamela Sainsbury’s behalf that she killed because of a mental abnormality, performing an act that no normal person would. The defence established their provocation narrative principally upon Erika Kontinnen’s lack of agency. Her amnesia surrounding the murder itself supported this perfectly, as she acknowledged her agency in the killing only by default, not confession. Crucially for the defence, her inability to remember the hours before the killing allowed for a glossing of the immediacy requirement of the defence of provocation, enabling a telescoping of events in her defence counsels’ reconstruction so that she appeared to have killed Hill after experiencing an instantaneous loss of control due to his threat to kill his family. This scenario undermines her agency by presenting her manifestation of BWS as determining her ability to perceive whether she was in danger and what action she would need to take to avoid it, claiming she needed to lose control to kill her extremely abusive and murderous partner, and suggesting her amnesia implied she didn’t know what she was doing. Tellingly, this amnesia springs directly from BWS theory. Erika’s defence narrative, then, makes overt this theory’s core non-agentic stereotype of battered women, which explains agency and self-regard through notions of passivity and submissiveness. The reliance upon the defences of provocation and diminished responsibility found in these cases confirms Western societies’ persistent privatization of domestic violence. For all three defences emphasized the


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effect of BWS or ‘acute stress’ on the women’s individual psyches. Hill’s, R.’s and Sainsbury’s private and localized violence was therefore the sole catalyst for their partners’ singular decisions to commit murder, thereby exempting the public domain from any castigation for limiting their options so dramatically that they were left with only lethal retaliation to save themselves and their families. Although Mrs R.’s case is still a cause célèbre, Pamela Sainsbury’s helped usher in the admissibility of BWS evidence in Britain and Erika Kontinnen’s set a precedent in allowing BWS testimony in Australia, none of these cases radically improved the legal situation of other battered women. Mrs R.’s case, for instance, merely showed that: South Australia [took] the position that a mother, upon learning that her five daughters had been sexually abused over a twenty-year period by her husband could not be provoked to kill him in the first place because of the fact that he was not present when she learned this information and could not then remain provoked for a period of less than one day. (Greene, 1989: 156) Instead of causing profound alterations in the treatment of women by the legal system, this case, then, only made manifest the rigidity of the law, the impossibility of achieving justice through a strict application of its rules and regulations and the exceptional difficulties inherent in changing it. Pamela Sainsbury’s case, unlike Mrs R.’s, played by the rules of the day in alleging diminished responsibility. However, in doing so, this case too did not help courts to better understand battered women, nor why they kill. It may have been advantageous for Pamela Sainsbury to dismiss her agency, and thus lessen her responsibility, for her crime, but such a claim certainly doesn’t further the cause of women’s full citizenship in Western societies. Instead, this case aided the introduction of BWS testimony in British courts, which makes any claim of agency from battered women who kill extremely problematic. Clearly, self-defence would have been a better defence for Pamela Sainsbury, had it not come with the attendant risks of a mandatory life sentence. Sainsbury’s defence counsel argues this herself, but points out that battered women who kill are understandably less concerned about agentic representation or possible acquittal, than they are about being seen to be passive and granted a certain reduced sentence (Kennedy, 1993: 209). Pragmatism thus collides in these cases with the general feminist philosophical quest to have female agency and citizenship fully acknowledged; and for as long as British murder convictions continue to carry the threat of mandatory life imprisonment, pragmatism will always win the battle. The admission of BWS testimony as a supposed reform of battered women’s position under the law has been shown as very much a mixed blessing as well. Certainly it helped gain Erika Kontinnen her acquittal, as

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it enabled the admission of evidence relating to Hill’s violence. Yet BWS theory only promotes understanding of the behaviour of battered women through a construction of passivity. Even the name of the syndrome, ‘battered woman syndrome’, attributes passivity to these survivors of domestic violence. Battered women are not seen to act; on the contrary, they are the battered, the products of the batterer. The phrase ‘battered women who kill’ thus removes the woman’s agency, suggesting that her act of killing is really determined by another’s act of battery. The woman herself is neatly elided by the clash of the terms ‘battered’ and ‘kill’. Her identities and subjectivities and her reasons for killing are not part of her definitional identity. One of the reasons for the inability of any discourse, especially BWS, to fully ‘explain’ the behaviour of battered women who kill is, I would argue, as Lynda Hart does regarding incest survivors, that the very conditions of their existence at all are paradoxical. Like incest survivors, battered women must manage to maintain two mutually exclusive ideas simultaneously as essential conditions of their survival (Hart, 1998: 177). They must continue to exist in a world that still values the concepts of marriage and family, while knowing that they live in a domestic war zone. They must go on living with a man who may be filled with remorse one day and psychotically homicidal the next. They know that marriage and family can be terrifying prisons from which there is no escape, yet they continue to validate the societal ideal of marriage just by remaining in a situation where they are, in reality, hostages. Like incest survivors, these women are ‘not meant to survive’ (Hart, 1998: 178, emphasis in original) because they have unwittingly unearthed the knowledge that, in Lacanian terms, ‘reality is a ruse that masks the Real’ (cited in Hart, 1998: 178). Battered women may now be finally allowed to speak something of their experience, but the Western heteropatriachal need for the Real of marriage and family to remain veiled will continue to demand that, in speaking, these women lose their rights and responsibilities as full citizens in their own communities. For expression of their experience is not merely about uncovering the previously repressed, nor even about negating dominant discourses around marriage and family. Rather, these survivor discourses demand, as Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray have remarked, ‘a transformation of the dominant formulation. The point of contention between dominant and survivor discourses is not over the determination of truth but over determination of the statable.’ (cited in Hart, 1998: 184–5). In attempting to state their experience at all, then, battered women who kill pay a very high existential price; they pay with their agency. When a battered woman kills after years of abuse, as in Mrs R.’s, Pamela Sainsbury’s and Erika Kontinnen’s cases, the appropriate defence from a lay person’s point of view would seem to be self-defence. Mrs R. argued that it was necessary to kill her husband both because he would have continued his attacks had he been allowed to live and because he would certainly have


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killed her had he discovered her knowledge. She also alleged defence of the self in psychological terms,25 insisting that Mr R. deserved to die because of the suffering he had wrought upon others. Pamela Sainsbury alleged her belief that ‘it was him or me’ and that she felt her husband would one day have killed her during a beating. Moreover, she couldn’t escape from him because of his threats to harm herself, her parents and her children were she to do so. Erika Kontinnen likewise argued that she had to kill Edward Hill to prevent her own murder and those of Olga and Archie. Thus, she not only killed in defence of herself but in defence of another woman and her child. As we have already seen, the law of self-defence has undergone some modification, making it more accessible for battered women who kill abusive partners. The reclassification of the requirement of immediacy as imminence means that battered women, who are under fairly constant, yet unpredictable, threat of attack, can explain why they may have attacked their partner during a period of non-confrontation, for instance while he slept. Broader understandings of proportionality now allow battered women to assert their need to arm themselves against an unarmed victim/abuser because of power and size differentials and because of the extreme level of fear and panic many severely battered women experience. The final requirement, however, which asserts the reasonableness of the killing, remains the most difficult obstacle for battered women. For, even though many legal commentators consider the alteration to self-defence doctrine, so that it is now based on necessity, to be an important and effective change in opening up the defence for battered women who kill, it nevertheless still relies on the problematic concept of rationality, which historically has worked against women using this defence. The proof that a battered woman’s killing of her partner was a reasonable act under the circumstances relies on many elements which exist outside legal discourse. A woman who kills her male partner threatens the social fabric of her culture; such an act disturbs, challenges and questions the modern Western incarnations of the ideologies of family, marriage and heterosexuality. The role of women in Western societies is likewise queried. Women have long been socialized to think of others before themselves; to value nurturance, love and care at the expense of autonomy and independence; to have a weaker, more fluid sense of self than the strong ego boundaries associated with traditional masculine selves.26 A woman who kills asserts a self dedicated to placing herself first. Mrs R., Pamela Sainsbury and Erika Kontinnen asserted selves more concerned with their personal need for themselves and their families to live and be free of abuse, than with their partners’ need to dominate. Mrs R.’s acts, in particular, have still further implications. In her insistence, common to many battered women who kill, that she had good reason to kill her partner, she imparts a potentially revolutionary message, dangerous in Western societies still dominated by major institutions such as law or media founded on patriarchal principles. Lenore Walker expresses this message thus:

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Inconceivable survivors It is entirely possible, albeit unproven, that women who kill their batterers are subconsciously perceived as expressing a collective message from all women to all men: your days of controlling us are over. (1990: 218, emphasis in original)

The power this message holds derives at least in part from its suggestion that battered women are angry and vengeful when they kill their abusive partners. Rage has traditionally been denied in representations of women in Western societies. In many women, according to psychologists and psychoanalysts, it is forced inward to transform into depression, producing a melancholy ‘more typical of the feminine voice than rage’ (Lidoff, 1983: 121). Even Lenore Walker, who acknowledges its existence, downplays the significance of anger as a catalyst when battered women kill, claiming that fear is the most important factor in these homicides, as the women are unable to feel anger until after the murder, when the fear is gone (1990: 201). Certainly, as is evident in all three cases, in the everyday context of the battering relationship it is essential for the woman to keep her rage under wraps, as any suggestion of it could mean her own death or serious injury. However, Mrs R. and the women interviewed by Walker state that their own anger at an increasingly violent and threatening situation galvanized them out of immobilizing fear27 and into action at the time of the murder. Yet Walker insists repeatedly that: ‘Anger is the emotion that follows homicide’ (1990: 219), and further that ‘anger does not cause battered women to kill the men who beat them nearly to death’ (1990: 219), even though she admits many battered women are angry. Her reasons for this denial may be more pragmatic than philosophical as ‘[j]udicial sympathy for the human fallibility of provoked men is not afforded so generously to battered women’ (Radford, 1993: 195–6). Indeed, anger on the part of such women is deemed illegitimate, supposedly ‘proving’ that their attacks on their abusers were solely revenge-motivated (Radford, 1993: 195–6). Walker’s denial, however, may also result from her own genderizing of the motives driving someone to kill. As she states: ‘To kill out of anger would be a male response’ (1990: 202). It is not in the least surprising, then, that battered women find it very difficult to convey to juries and the judiciary that their actions were reasonable. The idea that a woman could kill her partner and still meet the legal standard of reasonableness, particularly that of the reasonable perception of danger, is a reality few people want to acknowledge, let alone accept (Walker, 1990: 188). Hence, although self-defence law may now allow for the incorporation of battered women’s experiences, as Fiona Manning observes, the spirit of that law is still at the mercy of its judicial interpretation and application. She lists several reasons which account for the legal reluctance to expand the use of self-defence law to encompass battered women who kill: the male realities


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on which the defence was traditionally based have become entrenched; the legal profession is still dominated by men who don’t or can’t understand women’s experience and choices; traditional myths and stereotypes about domestic violence are still prevalent; and finally, due to concern not to encourage any other battered women to act similarly (1996: 16–17). Julie Stubbs and Julia Tolmie concur, arguing that courts are further resistant to claims of self-defence from battered women who kill because of the history of minimization of the violence of the deceased, which is often referred to only as ‘marital discord’, and because courts have failed to understand that other avenues of help were not open to, or not effective for, battered women who resort to murder (1994: 193–4). While most battered women see their actions as self-defensive or self-preservative, then, their lawyers often refuse to argue self-defence before the court (Manning, 1996: 15). Nevertheless, the defence of self-defence is recognized by many legal commentators as the most appropriate defence when battered women kill abusive partners. Julia Tolmie suggests that this is so because self-defence ‘better accommodates [than provocation] homicides by battered women who are primarily acting in self-preservation and not because they are “out of control” ’ (1990: 64). Moreover, self-defence law, as it currently stands, does not need BWS testimony to meet its requirements. Evidence of a pattern of battering is important in determining whether the victim initiated the aggression and whether there was a past history of battering which would help account for the necessity of the killing at the time, but self-defence law does not require evidence regarding the psychology of the battered woman (Downs, 1996: 228; Stubbs and Tolmie, 1994: 209). Besides, even if this were to become a consideration, in Schopp’s terms it is more convincingly argued using economic or social explanations than BWS logic (1998: 112). In terms of the present coding and theorizing of the defence laws, then, self-defence is the only defence which potentially guarantees battered women cognizance of their agency and responsibility for their homicides, yet also grants them understanding sufficient to absolve them from legally sanctioned punishment.28 This defence recognizes that in some circumstances killing is both justifiable and necessary to prevent one’s own demise. Further to this, it ensures that the perpetrator is considered rational and reasonable in taking such drastic action. As Robert Schopp has pointed out, selfdefence ‘applies to conduct justified by the circumstances, rather than to defendants who seem contrite’ (1998: 128), or, one might argue, inadequate. Continuing application of the expanded doctrine is thus crucial if selfdefence is ever going to become more than the male standard it currently remains. The removal of some of the obstacles to battered women’s usage of it means that, in theory, it allows for gender equity, and admits genderspecific details in order to determine a suitable judgement in individual cases. In practice, self-defence largely remains the preserve of men, with battered women still relying on the far less appropriate defence of provocation (Manning, 1996: 17). Until battered women can take full advantage of

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the changes in self-defence law, then, they remain inconceivable survivors; those who should not exist at all; those whose experience heteropatriarchy, at least, doesn’t truly want to hear. Moreover, while battered women’s killings of their abusive partners continue to be cast as unreasonable and irrational, all women’s claims to full citizenship in Western societies are, perforce, partial and weak.

Recuperable subjects: battered women, feminism and legal theory Battered women who kill have proven the most recuperable of murderous women for feminist and traditional legal theory alike. Women who murder, as I argued in Chapter 2, are generally subject to portrayals in traditional legal theory that place them beyond the pale, outside humanity. Even feminist legal theory, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, sometimes neglects certain murderous women, effectively creating a dichotomy between murder cases acceptable to feminism and those not. However, although they begin their cases in the double jeopardy common to any woman who commits murder, battered women are often quickly rehabilitated to the status of victims, more sinned against than sinning. In traditional legal discourse this process of recuperation is a great deal less certain than it is in feminist discourses, nevertheless it is still more likely to occur with battered women who kill than with any other female killers. The case of R v R represents one instance in the development of this recuperative desire in cases where battered women kill, as it encompasses both traditional legal discourse’s inability to handle such cases appropriately and the disaffection and frustration this engendered in a community sympathetic to her plight. The inequities and misunderstandings inherent in the coding of particular defence laws came under public scrutiny largely because Mrs R. was precluded, on the basis of her gender, from utilizing a legally acceptable narrative to explain, defend and justify her actions. Community displeasure at this clear injustice effectively led, then, to the need for a legally recuperative narrative for women in such positions. This case thus makes particularly plain the ways in which discursive imperatives constrain and enable the production of subjects. Traditional legal discourse only allowed for constitution of Mrs R.’s legal subjectivities in certain limited ways, actively foreclosing against alternative representations encompassing more sympathy towards her situation. This discourse’s lack of a recuperative narrative model therefore both ensured Mrs R.’s conviction for murder in her first trial, while ironically engineering the jury’s perverse verdict in her second. The lack of a legally recuperative narrative in the R. case did not, however, entail non-agentic representation. Indeed, the depictions of Mrs R.’s agency demonstrate that battered women frequently received more recognition of this important trait prior to the development of feminist narratives of BWS which have since been appropriated by mainstream legal


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discourse. Mrs R. took responsibility for the homicide throughout her case, maintaining her rationality if not her culpability at every opportunity. Her retelling of her actions stands in stark contrast to stories of similar homicides told in more recent cases, such as Sainsbury and Kontinnen, where portrayals of female agency are neglected in favour of representations based around new psychiatric syndromes. Feminist discourses, both legal and psychological, have been enormously influential in positing the new BWS narrative of battered women, which is fast on its way to becoming an alternative stock story for use in Western courts. Its popularity for traditional legal and media discourses stems from the implicit denial of agency to battered women who kill. Furthermore, this narrative both emphasizes the similarity of battered women to victimized people everywhere and stresses their unusual situations. This then encourages a general conclusion that domestically violent relationships are distressingly common, yet urges a specific inference that the particular relationships under consideration were exceptionally brutal and sadistic. Battered women who kill are thus at one and the same time welcomed into a society which accepts the reality of domestic violence, yet also cast out as belonging to a brutalized minority group in which murder represents the only means of escape. Battered women’s victim status is thus double edged, on the one hand guaranteeing them some degree of sympathy, if not empathy, while on the other ensuring their representation as pathologized freaks. Important issues such as societal responsibility for the crime of domestic violence and women’s right to safety are thereby elided in favour of a concentration on the particular and the bizarre. Feminist deployments of the BWS narrative frequently insist upon a concurrent recognition of societal culpability and the need for more effective public action in cases of domestic violence. This strategy is hardly new, harking back to the earliest moments of second wave feminism and the ubiquitous slogan ‘the personal is political’. Indeed, the ending of domestic violence has always been central to the traditional feminist project of ‘women’s liberation’, as battered women literally embody patriarchal oppression. Nevertheless, recuperation of the battered women who kill at the heart of this most recent BWS tale remains possible only because of their positioning as victims. Female agency continues to be problematic, as comparison of the case studies in this chapter makes evident. Contemporary feminist legal intervention in the guise of defences alleging diminished responsibility or the BWS narrative meant that both Pamela Sainsbury’s and Erika Kontinnen’s agency were more thoroughly undermined than was Mrs R.’s a decade prior. Erika and Pamela were portrayed as having ‘snapped’, where Mrs R. was viewed as decisive, as amnesic where Mrs R. was responsible, as terrified and helpless where Mrs R. was angry, as desperate where Mrs R. was defending herself and her family. Ultimately, then, although Mrs R. had a more difficult progress through the legal system than either Pamela Sainsbury or Erika Kontinnen, she nonetheless emerges as a more

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compelling figure of female resistance to male control and oppression than do her victimized, legally recuperated counterparts. Comparison of these cases shows the pitfalls of legal defences and stock stories which use discourses of mental incapacity or BWS to achieve semiotic recuperation of battered women killers at the cost of denying recognition of their agency and responsibility. Battered women who kill require the possibility of a new legal narrative which would uphold their claims of self-defence and make semiotic rehabilitation unimportant. This narrative would base representation upon a concept of determined agency whereby battered women would be considered to have made a rational choice in killing abusive, life-threatening partners, yet to have been coerced into that decision through a lack of societal support and recognition of their situation. An emphasis on societal responsibilities in forestalling such crimes of desperation would then problematize the public/private split, insisting that although privacy requires protection it should not also shield male criminal behaviour. This self-defence narrative would portray battered women agentically yet also contextualize their actions within their class, race, ethnic and cultural backgrounds and within a more general analysis of gendered oppression in Western heteropatriarchal societies. Recuperation would thus become unnecessary, as battered women who kill would not be considered to have acted unreasonably, nor to have stepped outside the realm of the human in the first place. Instead, they would be regarded as having taken necessary, justifiable action to protect their own physical and/or psychical health. Moreover, battered women’s homicide narratives would no longer require the currently inevitable legal translation of feminine agency and responsibility into masculine understandings of irrationality and provocation. Finally, battered women would be able to tell their own stories to courts which could listen.

4

Cultural anxiety and vampiric voracity Tracey Wigginton’s ‘hunger’

Introduction: setting the (theoretical) scene The representations of Tracey Wigginton, dubbed the ‘notorious lesbian vampire killer’ by the media, have much to tell us about the borders of acceptable and recuperable subjectivities in mainstream law and media and about the contours of Western heteropatriarchy’s deepest, most abject, fears. The case is transitional in this study, demonstrating both explicit strategies of rejection in mainstream legal and media discourses and overt recuperative measures in alternative, particularly feminist and psychiatric, discourses. Unlike the actions of battered women who kill, Tracey Wigginton’s actions are not recuperable within mainstream law and media; yet, as I shall demonstrate in Chapter 5, nor are they disavowed as completely in both mainstream and alternative discourses as are those of women like Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck. The tales of the Tracey Wigginton case attest to a deeply entrenched cultural anxiety regarding vampirism. For an interesting thing about this case is not that the vampire narrative was initially told, but that it persists still in the face of other, commonly recuperative, explanations from psychiatrists and from Tracey Wigginton herself. I shall argue that the mainstream media’s reluctance to challenge this narrative frame confirms the primal threat that Tracey Wigginton’s murder of Edward Baldock represented for Western heteropatriarchy. Her killing of a male stranger and her legal and media vilification as a butch lesbian are shown to radically problematize traditional gender performatives within mainstream legal and media discourses. Her diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder (hereafter MPD) also destabilizes these discourses’ dependence upon concepts of a unitary self and an integrated personality, reinforcing the fragile nature of representation itself. Lastly, the random nature of Edward Baldock’s selection as Tracey Wigginton’s victim plays on the unconscious fears that all human subjects have regarding pain, bodily attack and death (Creed, 1993: 156). The media attempted to soothe terrors and resolve uncertainties through recourse to the vampire narrative, which both vilified Tracey Wigginton as outside society and mythified her as outside the human. Her human agency

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Vampiric voracity

was thus transformed into diabolical agency, negating the need for serious consideration of her acts in the context of her society and her experiences as a human subject. Indeed, as the rejection of the psychiatric narrative shows, the need to divorce Tracey Wigginton from her humanity was demonstrably stronger than the need to deny her agency. This chapter will approach the narratives told in this case in chronological order, beginning with the earliest tale of the lesbian vampire and ending with the most recent tales of child abuse and revenge. It will conclude with a discussion of the reasons for the persistence of the vampire story and the way in which the abject character of many of the elements of this tale actually maintains our fears even as their narrated rejection supposedly protects our illusion of safety.

Without rhyme or reason: Tracey’s (non-)story In the early morning hours of Saturday 21 October 1989, in a quiet park on the banks of the Brisbane river, Tracey Wigginton stabbed Edward Clyde Baldock to death. She didn’t know him, had never met him before, yet she stabbed him more than fifteen times, virtually decapitating him in the process. Her prompt arrest on Sunday morning for the killing was entirely due to the police discovery of her ATM card in the victim’s shoe. Within twenty-four hours her three friends had also given themselves up to the police and been charged with being accomplices to murder. These three were Tracey Wigginton’s lover Lisa Ptaschinski and another couple, Tracey Waugh and Kim Jervis. All were in their early twenties and none had known Tracey Wigginton particularly well or for any length of time. However, their story of the events of 21 October 1989, and of Tracey Wigginton herself, eventually generated some of the most sensational and extraordinary evidence ever heard in the Queensland Supreme Court. Tracey Wigginton’s initial tale of the night in question, by contrast to that of her accomplices, was too brief and simple to be in the least interesting to either lawyers or journalists at the time of her arrest and trial. It ran thus: on that fateful Friday the four women met in a lesbian nightclub in Fortitude Valley in Brisbane. They left the club at 11.30 pm and drove around inner city streets for half an hour or so until they spotted Edward Baldock staggering drunkenly home from the nearby Caledonian Club. Tracey Wigginton and Kim Jervis enticed him into the car with promises of sexual favours and then drove him to Orleigh Park, an area frequently used as a lovers’ lane. Tracey Wigginton and Edward Baldock got out of the car and walked down to the river bank, where he removed all his clothes, except for his socks, apparently in anticipation of said favours. Tracey Wigginton then stabbed him until he was dead. She had no idea as to how her ATM card came to be found in Edward Baldock’s shoe, so the police formed the theory that Edward Baldock had placed it there himself, thinking it was his, and so inadvertently helped to catch his killer.

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Over a year after the killing, in late January 1991, Tracey Wigginton pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Her trial took approximately nine minutes and, as is usual in Australia in cases where the defendant pleads guilty, lacked a jury. This trial barely rated a mention in the press, with reports limited to tiny paragraphs buried on inside pages of the major Queensland newspapers. The ‘real’ story for the dominant media centred, as it had from the beginning of the case, on the bizarre allegations of the accomplices.

Eating Edward: the accomplices’ tale The trial of Lisa Ptaschinski, Kim Jervis and Tracey Waugh began on 29 January 1991 and ran for more than two weeks. They claimed that Tracey Wigginton was a vampire, who survived only by drinking fresh blood. She usually obtained cow and pig blood from the butcher’s but was not averse to sucking the blood from the slit veins of her girlfriend, Lisa Ptaschinski. Shortly before the murder, however, Tracey had told her friends of a craving for a large ‘feed’ of human blood, a craving which could only be satisfied by the death of the victim. True to her magical status as a vampire, she not only drank blood but also kept little bats (traditional familiars of vampires and witches, and sometimes animal vampires themselves), always wore black, and never went out in the sun or looked in mirrors. Most importantly, Tracey Wigginton exerted a very strong influence over her associates, even though she had only known them for an extremely brief period; she had met Lisa Ptaschinski one week prior to the murder, and had known the other two for approximately a fortnight. According to the accomplices, Tracey Wigginton was very persuasive and utterly convincing in her demands that these three aid her in committing a murder so that she could drink blood. In their opinion, she was a charismatic ‘devil’s wife’ who had mind control over them and exerted what even the prosecutor in the trial called a ‘Hitler like’ influence (R v Ptaschinski, Jervis and Waugh, 15.2.91).

Vexatious vampires Vampire stories have been told for thousands of years, and permeate Western culture as readily available stock stories of overpowering lust, greed and wickedness. Indeed, Brian Frost, in The Monster with a Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and Literature, argues that the vampire is ‘possibly as old as man [sic] himself’ (1989: 5), dating back to ancient Assyria and Babylon. Many of the earliest vampires were female, such as the classical Greek Empusae and the Roman Lamia. This tradition of vampiric women has continued throughout the history of vampire fiction, with female vampires even making an appearance in that most famous narrative of male vampirism, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.1 A connection between vampirism and lesbianism is likewise not new. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’, which

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narrated the tale of ‘a beautiful female vampire’s attempts to seduce a frail young girl’ (cited in Frost, 1989: 46), is one of the earliest examples of these tales, which were popular throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s (Frost, 1989: 48–9, 68–9). Vampire narratives, and the figure of the female vampire in particular, remain entrenched in the contemporary public imagination. Barbara Creed, in her study The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, points out that female vampires became especially common in vampire and other horror films of the 1970s (1993: 59). Most of the time these female vampires continue their historical tradition as lesbians, and this, she claims, is a ‘happy’ combination ‘since both figures are represented in popular culture as sexually aggressive women’ (1993: 59). Vampirism is both so fascinating and yet so monstrous within Western societies because it coalesces several abject elements, making it perhaps the most abject of all acts. Julia Kristeva’s observation in Powers of Horror that creation of the abject is crucial within the religious and legal traditions of Western cultures is especially noticeable in the case of modern-day vampirism. For, as Barbara Creed declares, the same concerns trouble both ancient and contemporary discourses regarding abjection, including ‘sexual immorality and perversion; corporeal alteration, decay and death; human sacrifice; murder; the corpse; bodily wastes; the feminine body and incest’ (1993: 9). These practices and objects are as vital to modern horror stories of the vampire as they were to earlier myths and legends of supernatural devils and inhuman demons. Our conception of the monstrous, in Creed’s terms, is based on our understanding of abject deeds and things (1993: 9). The vampire takes the lives of those it bites, producing that most abject creation of all, the corpse. Kristeva points out that the individual is generally able to remove her- or himself from abject bodily wastes, such as faeces, urine or blood, keeping the body clean. However, the corpse, as was noted in Chapter 1, represents the body itself as finally becoming waste, decaying matter, and no amount of extrication from the polluted state is possible for the dead individual. Furthermore, vampires enjoy their cadavers, sucking their blood from their pierced necks, covering themselves in abject matter. Dead bodies are considered in religious discourses as the human remains once the soul has fled. In killing and drinking their human victims’ life force, vampires are polluted with death, losing their souls as they devour the soulless corpse (Creed, 1993: 10). Vampires, like all abject creatures, cross borders, between human and inhuman, good and evil. Female, and particularly lesbian, vampires also cross boundaries between those who perform proper gender roles and those who don’t, and between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ sexual desires (Creed, 1993: 11). The female vampire, as Creed states, does not respect or follow the rules for sexual conduct; her lust for blood makes her the sexual aggressor instead of the more traditionally ‘proper’ passive recipient (1993: 61). Lesbian vampires, clearly, are even further abject in that they pursue other women, thus contravening both female gender and sexual roles. Indeed, Creed avers

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that their sexual desire makes them ‘the most abject of all vampire monsters’ (1993: 72). Yet, although predatory killers by nature, Brian Frost claims that female vampires, especially, exhibit enormous attraction for their lovers and eventual victims, holding them spellbound even once their bloodlust is made fully apparent (1989: 44). Humans are drawn into their ‘erotic embrace’ (Creed, 1993: 59) even while they are repulsed and disgusted. Vampire narratives generally provoke anxiety in those who ‘consume’ them because of the attraction/repulsion their abjection generates. Vampirism depends on an oral relation which Barbara Creed, citing Ernst Jones’ essay ‘On the nightmare of bloodsucking’, equates, in the case of female vampirism, with oral sex: the vampire sucks the blood of the man as she might suck semen from his penis (Creed, 1993: 69).2 Furthermore, semen is occasionally correlated with milk in both consistency and colour (Creed, 1993: 70). In Jones’ metaphor, then, the sucking of semen from a man’s penis is deliberately confused with ideas of blood letting and milk suckling. The vampire’s suckled victim is hereby feminized as s/he is placed in the primal position of the breastfeeding mother. However, as vampirism necessarily requires a bite, a severing of the skin, its metaphoric connection with oral sex also contains a threat of castration in terms both of the removal of the penis and of the rendering of powerlessness through death. Hence, vampirism’s metaphoric mixing of blood/semen/milk is deeply abject, positioned on the border of life and death,3 combining pleasurable sexual satisfaction with painful castration, pollution with innocence,4 trust with fear. An alternative account of Western societies’ ambivalence towards vampires is found in Joan Copjec’s essay ‘Vampires, Breast Feeding and Anxiety’ (1991), which argues that this disquiet originates in our earliest attempts to separate from our mothers and develop subjectivity. She contends that the vampire’s jouissance gained through sucking reminds us of our own breastfeeding. However, Copjec disagrees with Creed that sucking is necessarily vampiric. Instead, she claims, following Lacan, that vampirism is located in the infant’s desire for the breast and consequent fear of the drying up of that breast. In order to become a self, a subject, states Copjec, we must ‘throw out, reject our non-selves’ (1991: 34), our completeness with the breast. However, this separation can only occur through an inclusion within ourselves of that which we are not – ‘within our being, this lack-of-being’ (1991: 34). This means, then, that the breast becomes an ‘extimate’ object, both part of us and not part of us (1991: 35). The figure of the vampire, in Copjec’s analysis, forces us to confront this extimate object within ourselves, engendering an uncanniness, an anxiety. For vampires are a double-edged threat. They both threaten our (metaphoric) safety through their desire for the breast, evoking as well that ‘lost part of ourselves, whose absence prevents us from becoming whole’ (Copjec, 1991: 35). They also function as our bodily doubles, like us in all ways except that they have retained that which we had to sacrifice in order

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to become subjects. So, according to Copjec, vampires terrify us because they threaten our physical well-being in their overt Otherness and because they appear as our doubles, duplicates of their victims. Our negated desires for the breast underlie the extremity of their lust to suck the entire body dry, to drink in their whole life force. Vampires, then, are extimate objects in themselves, both Other to us yet like us, radically alien yet horribly familiar. For vampires’ search for nourishment culminates in a bloodlust which far exceeds their infantile desire for the breast and demands the sacrificial death of a randomly chosen victim. Their extimate relation to us means they simultaneously present our potential to kill, our overpowering need for nourishment, and our vulnerability as possible victims. We can neither identify too closely for fear of finding traces of our own monstrous desires, nor look away too quickly without reassuring ourselves that they are indeed Other.

Depravity incarnate: mainstream legal and media responses The Tracey Wigginton case is important for feminist study because it shows how monsterization and vilification deny human agency in representations of women who kill. Furthermore, it highlights the desire within legal and media discourses to limit the parameters of the narratives told about such cases, thereby displaying their usefulness as cautionary tales and morality plays to warn young women, in particular, about the dangers of developing values, interests and proclivities which dominant heterosexist society deems unacceptable. Interestingly, given the case’s later appellation as the ‘lesbian vampire case’, it began not with the theme of vampirism, but with overtones of witchcraft and Satanism.5 On the very day of the women’s arrest, a Brisbane paper, the Sunday Mail, stated that police believed the four belonged to a ‘cult of Satan worshippers who hated men’ and who engaged in blood drinking and human sacrifice, largely because they ‘appeared to have tried to remove [Baldock’s] head’ (Gillespie and Hansen, 22.10.89) during his killing. The Australian’s story on the arrests also described the women as ‘devil worshippers’ and Baldock’s killing as ‘the act of a bizarre satanic group’ (Orr, 23.10.89). The Courier-Mail’s coverage further heightened hysteria, stating that, according to an ‘occult expert’, ‘human sacrifice was an “inevitable” part of widespread satanic rituals in Brisbane’, which also involved ‘animal sacrifice, drugs and group sex’ (Fitzpatrick, 23.10.89). However, as Susanne Davies and Andrea Rhodes-Little (1993) note, lawyers in the accomplices’ trial quickly dismissed these allegations in favour of that of vampirism. Indeed, the primary focus of the accomplices’ trial was a concerted legal and media campaign to turn Tracey Wigginton into a vampire and to maintain her presence at the centre, or rather as the centre, of the case. To begin

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with, all three accomplices presented Tracey Wigginton’s obsession with her need for blood as the overriding force in her life. Some press articles then reported these extraordinary claims as facts, eliding psychiatric evidence that Lisa Ptaschinski, in particular, merely suffered from a delusion that Tracey Wigginton was a vampire.6 Instead of approaching the accomplices’ claims with some suspicion, then, the press in the main preferred to stress Tracey Wigginton’s enjoyment of her quarry with headlines such as ‘Blood killer … feasted on victim’ (Walker, 2–3.2.91) and verbatim transcripts of Tracey Waugh’s statement that Wigginton looked like she had just had a three course meal after the killing.7 Tracey’s search for blood, and the required death of her victim, thus became consistent themes throughout the legal and media presentations of the case.8 For their perpetual iteration ensured her abjection, not only as a killer, but as a cannibalistic blood drinker, an inhabitant of the realm of the unliveable. Tracey Wigginton’s alien nature was further ‘confirmed’ as the accomplices’ trial wound on. The Melbourne Truth, for example, chose to ‘prove’ her love of blood once and for all by running a story on how she enjoyed performing oral sex on her lovers while they were menstruating (cited in Davies and Rhodes-Little, 1993: 17). The Sydney Morning Herald, on the other hand, dehumanized her completely with descriptions of her at the killing as like a ‘shark in a feeding frenzy’ (1.2.91). However, her sexual perversion, evidenced through her active seeking of the ‘unfortunate’ Baldock, combined with her vampirism, remained her most alienating characteristics. For she was presented by her accomplices as a lesbian who could nevertheless ‘pose as a prostitute’ (MacArthur, 1.2.91) and lure Baldock to a park with the promise of sexual favours. Like all vampires, then, she was a liar,9 able to change her role at will, yet never apparently losing her charisma that gave her control over both her accomplices and her victim. She was indeed similar to a ‘movie vampire’ (West Australian, 8.2.91), her friends proclaimed, perhaps enacting the part of Miriam in The Hunger, enticing, alluring and finally lethal. So appropriate did this scenario appear that the investigating detectives also affirmed its explanatory power, admitting to having watched The Hunger in the early days of the case in an attempt to find clues as to the women’s motive in the crime (Jones, 29.10.89). Later, comparisons with ‘Hollywood vampires’ became seemingly unavoidable when one policeman who had interviewed Tracey Wigginton on several occasions remembered her dark, lustrous eyes, which stared ‘right through you’10 (Petersen and Gagliardi, 16.2.91; Gagliardi, 16.2.91a) in the same way that close-ups of vampires’ eyes in films have always done. Her threat, therefore, was of mythic proportions in this narrative, and subject to no constraints of law or humanity. Tracey Wigginton instead pleased herself, like the epic gods and goddesses from classical Greek and Roman mythology, because she was not of society, but an inhuman vampire playing a part centuries old and transcendent of human concerns. This narrative, then, undertook not so much to explain her crime as to find mythic

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precedents for it. For understanding depends on an acknowledgement of human agency, and neither the defence counsel nor the media could afford Tracey Wigginton such ordinariness. Why vampires? Newsworthiness criteria, which determine the selection of news in terms of its geographical proximity to the home audience, its unusual, bizarre and interesting nature, and its inclusion of violence, make it fairly clear as to why the media took such frequent interest in the Tracey Wigginton story.11 A more interesting question to answer, however, is why these elements of the supernatural and the occult should have appeared in the first place. Certainly, the police and the defence lawyers at that time were left with little choice but to accept the accomplices’ story, faced as they were with a silent murderer, on the one hand, and a consistent, if strange, narrative of the crime on the other. Motives are very important to defence lawyers, especially if they desire to prove their clients were also the victims of the primary perpetrator, in this case Tracey Wigginton. Their desire to deny their clients’ culpability also explains the defence’s reluctance to pursue the initial suggestions of Satanism and witchcraft, as such allegations of group membership draw attention to the willingness and agency of all those involved in any rituals undertaken rather than detract from notions of individual responsibility. However, the defence lawyers’ tactics say very little about why the three accomplices should have chosen to tell such a tale and why their defence team should have believed that such a story would be successful in proving their clients’ innocence, or at least their impotence, in the murder of Edward Baldock. Answers to these concerns are to be found in two important aspects of this case. The first of these involves Tracey Wigginton’s silence. The accomplices’ story assumed the importance it did in both legal and media representations because it provided an explanation for the murder which Tracey Wigginton notoriously failed to supply herself at that time. For, apart from admitting that she killed Edward Baldock, and providing a graphic account of how she had done so, Tracey Wigginton said virtually nothing at all for six and a half years. Her silence about matters of motive and intent became a problem for the journalists and legal personnel involved in the case because it did not allow for understanding. Michel Foucault has discussed the problem the silent murderer poses for modern justice systems in his essay ‘The Dangerous Individual’ (1988). He demonstrates that questions of motive and of the personality and background of the criminal have become far more important in twentieth-century legal process than either the crime or the criminal’s admission or denial of guilt. If the criminal is silent, the legal machinery begins to break down. In her refusal to divulge her reasons for the crime, to speak herself, for the first six years of this case, Tracey Wigginton performed

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the unknowable self, refusing to allow access to the workings of her mind and thereby jamming the machinery of law. For now that the reason for the crime has replaced the commission of the crime as the rationale for punishment in modern Western legal practice, a motive is demanded in order to make that punishment understandable. The second aspect regards the vital role that explanations and some sense of narrative coherence play in the media’s telling of the story to the public, and in legal presentations of the case in court. The desire of the narrator to ensure coherence can lead to the use of stock stories, familiar to their intended audience, which will provide this coherence virtually independent of content. The media’s reportage of crime usually revolves around the stock story of the morality play. This particular format assumes an added importance in the case of women killers, as stock narratives invoked when women kill differ dramatically from and are far more polarized than those used about men who are violent or who kill. Figures such as the vampire or witch are invoked in legal and media representations of women who kill to illustrate the type of woman who is the subject of the narration, and to stymie more serious analyses of the violent woman as a complex individual. This sort of portrayal serves simultaneously to damn the woman herself and to reaffirm the idea of feminine evil, while all the time justifying and explaining the woman’s treatment under the institutions of law and media. Monsterization, thus, allays anxiety. Vilifying and condemning women like Tracey Wigginton means that the radical implications of their acts can be ignored rather than treated seriously. The necessity of social change promoting a less extreme, more humanist view of women who kill is elided through narratives such as this one of the lesbian vampire which maintain stereotypes of femininity and support the monstrous outsider status of women who challenge these stereotypes. Vampire and other narratives of female demons and monsters, therefore, can uphold the status quo most effectively, expelling both act and perpetrator as abject and inhuman, rendering them politically harmless. Myths, nevertheless, remain capable of endless retellings; although one narrativization may attempt to fix their meaning, the ambiguities endemic within their ancient histories continually resurface, causing trouble for those who would like clear resolutions, easy answers. Reliance on mythical understandings of acts like the murder of Edward Baldock is, thus, a slippery and uncertain undertaking, always prone to questioning and rethinking. This process is particularly clear in the Tracey Wigginton case, where the struggle to protect the veracity of the original mythic explanation from contradiction by other retellings of her story is explicit and ongoing.

Recuperating the beast: Tracey Wigginton as victim The media and the legal system are neither as monolithic nor as oppressive as this account of the Tracey Wigginton case might so far seem to imply.

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Alternative and resistant readings are inevitable; meaning is not and can never be entirely foreclosed by dominant interpreters. However, the media can obscure the impact of such resistance via selective reportage, thereby revealing, in this case, the carefully patrolled parameters of the ‘acceptable’ mythic explanation. Support for Tracey Wigginton from the lesbian community, for instance, was presented only in very muted terms in the media. The presence of a ‘small lesbian contingent’ at the accomplices’ trial was noted (Gagliardi, 16.2.91a),12 but the press, at least, did not see fit either to interview these women on their reactions to the case, or to quote responses reported in gay and lesbian press articles. Given that interviewing those who attend public trials is common journalistic practice, this seems a clear and deliberate omission on the media’s part, specifically designed to marginalize alternative, especially lesbian, comment on the case. These same desires are also found in the press reportage of perhaps the most influential alternative reading of the Tracey Wigginton case, which centered around her diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder. The two psychiatrists who assessed her during her fourteen-month stay in prison prior to her trial arrived at this diagnosis on the basis of her behaviour in hypnosis sessions. According to them, Tracey Wigginton had five personalities, lyrically described in the Sunday Mail as consisting of ‘ “Bobby”, a butch man-hater, “Big Tracey”, an insecure wimp, “Little Tracey”, a child, and “The Observer”, a detached onlooker … [all of whom were] dominated by a terrifying presence identified as “Avril” ’ (17.2.91). The ‘Bobby’ personality was responsible for the murder, in the psychiatrists’ opinion, although other alter egos such as ‘Little Tracey’ and ‘Avril’ were present as well; the only one who wasn’t was ‘Big Tracey’, who remembered nothing of the event whatsoever. ‘Bobby’ apparently told one of the psychiatrists that she had murdered Edward Baldock out of anger: with her grandfather who raped her, her grandmother who beat her and played sadistic games with her, her previous girlfriends, and her grandmother’s two male lovers. At no time did she mention being angry at her actual victim; she displayed no interest in him at all. Her psychiatrists did not believe she should stand trial and felt she needed further psychiatric treatment. The Mental Health Tribunal decided, however, that an MPD diagnosis did not suggest an infirmity of mind; it was regarded as a coping mechanism. Given this conclusion, Tracey Wigginton was therefore pronounced fit to plead (Tracey Avril Wigginton, Mental Health Tribunal hearing, 22.10.90). This psychiatric narrative clearly paints Tracey Wigginton as a victimized child suffering from a trauma-induced syndrome which reduced her impulse control. She is as much her own victim in this tale as is Edward Baldock, and is in need of as much protection from herself. Indeed, her psychiatrists successfully argued against her presence at the Tribunal hearing because of the possible distress she might have experienced at learning the content of her hypnosis sessions. Moreover, her fragmentation meant that she could not

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be evaluated as a single person as not all her personalities were responsible for the killing. In fact, according to her psychiatrists, one was even supposed to have ensured Tracey’s arrest through the careful placement of her ATM card in the victim’s shoe! Tracey herself was actually set up by her alter egos Bobby and Avril, who left her to face the consequences of a murder she couldn’t remember committing. Like the ‘breasted, vampiric double’ of whom Joan Copjec writes, Tracey Wigginton indeed possessed a ‘body too much’. Copjec notes that vampires act not only as ‘a double of the subject, [but] always stand in the way of or crowd out the subject’s own actions’ (1991: 36). Tracey Wigginton not only crowded out the actions of her fellow accomplices, her own vampiric alter egos crowded out those of ‘Tracey’ (as in ‘Big Tracey’) herself. The combination, then, of her excessive personalities (both in number and character) and her accomplices (those notorious ‘bodies too much’) produced an irresistible formula for destruction. Although clearly antagonistic to the media’s monster–vampire story, the psychiatric narrative also denies agency and reduces anxiety. In many ways, indeed, it is far more effective in this quest. For in this tale, Tracey, like the battered women of the last chapter, is presented as only partially responsible for her random murder of Edward Baldock because of her childhood abuse. In fact, Tracey’s culpability is even further minimized due to her almost complete lack of memory of the event. She is, thus, the non-agentic slave of past trauma evocative of pity rather than fear. The mythic terror her alleged vampirism had previously inspired is negated in this miserable, but mundane, story of a young woman finally, tragically and, crucially, unintentionally succumbing to the excesses of her psychotic alter egos. Her recuperation as a victim is, therefore, only effected at the expense of her agency, and indeed even of her consciousness, as is usually the case with victimology theses. She is rehabilitated to the status of human, but not to that of intentional, culpable citizen. This new psychiatric retelling of the Tracey Wigginton case is hardly an uncommon development in the contemporary West. Indeed, researchers like Elizabeth Ward consider incest and child sexual abuse to be ‘a phenomenon of epic proportions’ (1984: 3). Journalist Richard Guilliatt observes that child sexual abuse attained central importance in Australia in the mid1980s, appearing high on the agendas of societies such as the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse. The mid-1980s also saw many Australian governments directing much of their child welfare budgets to investigating child sexual abuse (Guilliatt, 1996: 19–21). So stories of abuse and incest were relatively ubiquitous and accepted in Australian welfare discourses and in the popular culture when Tracey Wigginton’s psychiatrists developed their narrative of MPD and victimization. Furthermore, as Foucault has suggested, these explanations also serve well to account for the criminal’s actions, to justify and defend his or her ‘self’. For psychiatric narratives aid courts in their discovery of who the criminal is,

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how they function, and the precise degree of their danger to society (Foucault, 1988: 125). Legal discourse now revolves around questions of possible causes for criminality resulting from an individual’s personal history and, as the discussion of Hilary Allen’s study in Chapter 2 shows, nowhere is this more so than in the cases of female criminals. Understandings of women’s criminal behaviour which were based upon their previous victimization were, thus, virtually standard by the time of Tracey Wigginton’s case in 1991. Tellingly, however, although Tracey Wigginton’s Tribunal hearing took place some months before her trial, the press chose to ignore this MPD narrative for as long as possible, waiting until the conclusion of the accomplices’ trial four months later to divulge this material to the public. Even then, it seems, the newspapers were almost forced into their few short reports on the diagnosis because Channel 9 in Brisbane had managed to obtain video recordings of the hypnosis sessions and had aired them interstate. Nevertheless, as these articles were paired with other longer pieces on her career of evil as a child, any credibility the tale might otherwise have held was effectively undercut.13 The Sunday Mail reported the MPD material in a small article headlined ‘The four faces of multiple terror’ (17.2.91) and surrounded by a much longer story with much larger headlines, entitled ‘Cradle of a demon. Hatefilled home bred a vampire’ (Kerr, 17.2.91). The first paragraph of this longer piece referred to a photograph of Tracey Wigginton’s childhood home and ran thus: ‘This is the house of horror where a bright and bubbly kid was transformed into a demon.’ This article revealed that she had been expelled from Rockhampton Girls’ Grammar due to the staff’s fortuitous recognition of her ‘nascent depravity’.14 She continued her career of sin at Range College, where she initiated a ‘reign of terror’ and ‘honed’ her ‘aggressive lesbianism’. It was conceded that Tracey hardly fared well at home, where she endured a ‘horrifying episode of cruelty and perversion’ during her grandparents’ abuse of her, but her innate evil, manifestations of which were evident from childhood, was still propounded as the reason behind her murder of Edward Baldock (Kerr, 17.2.91). The MPD diagnosis is completely separated from this material, giving the impression that it exists only as the rather deluded opinions of psychiatrists hired by the defence team, while the ‘real’ truth is to be found in the recollections of those who peopled Tracey Wigginton’s childhood. This implication is fully realized in the final paragraph of the article on MPD, in which it is stated that: ‘This dramatic difference in moods [characteristic of MPD sufferers] has perplexed those who knew her as a child growing up in Rockhampton. “She never showed anything of that … ” said one.’ (Sunday Mail, 17.2.91). In another article, Tracey Wigginton’s mother’s disbelief in the MPD diagnosis was made known (Lamble, 17.2.91); and police involved in the investigation of the case were described in the Australian as ‘convinced she was not under hypnotic influence at all [during her sessions

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with psychiatrists] but was “merely a fairly polished actor” ’, evidenced by her playing of leading roles in plays in the Brisbane Women’s Jail (MacArthur, 16–17.2.91a). So, although the press did report such material, its veracity was repeatedly subverted in favour of a reading of Tracey Wigginton as monster. For vilifying Tracey as evil and monstrous meant that her agency likewise became monstrous and outside the human. Her MPD diagnosis, suggestive as it was of her humanity and her own victimhood, evoked her extimate position within her society and consequently that society’s culpability. A vampire with a human face, even when non-agentic and victimized, proved too intolerable for integration, jeopardizing the vilificatory condemnation upon which anxiety reduction had so far depended.

‘Sexing the case’: feminist responses to Tracey Wigginton Feminist critiques, as demonstrated in Chapter 3, usually form another major source of alternative interpretations of the cases of female killers. Yet, in the Tracey Wigginton case, these have remained largely evaluative and descriptive. Rather than presenting a new reading of Tracey Wigginton, feminist theorists have preferred to deconstruct currently extant interpretations of the case in a similar manner to myself up to this point in this chapter. In this section I will review four major essays on the case and make reference to a fifth in which Tracey Wigginton is given brief consideration.15 Two of these articles consider the media’s representation of Tracey Wigginton as a vampire. Deb Verhoeven, in ‘Biting the Hand that Breeds: The Trials of Tracey Wigginton’ (1993), and Barbara Creed, in ‘Bitch Queen or Backlash?’ (1996), both agree that media coverage of this case reveals a pathological reliance on ‘a dichotomous and value-laden view of the world’, which unexpectedly creates ambivalence even as it attempts to clarify distinctions between the social and the anti-social, the human and the non-human (Verhoeven, 1993: 125–6). Female killers are transformed into ‘scapegoats on whom a phallocentric culture projects its deepest beliefs and darkest fears about women’ (Creed, 1996: 120), thus maintaining the radical dichotomy between the good, caring, passive woman and her evil, unnatural, castrating opposite. Creed argues, as do I, that the media consistently presented Tracey Wigginton as a demonic vampire, ignoring material pertaining to her childhood physical and sexual abuse because it didn’t fit with their narrative frame. This mythification of Tracey Wigginton had practical and economic aspects: she sold more newspapers and gained television news broadcasts’ higher ratings in her diabolical incarnation than she ever could as a figure of pity. Verhoeven, on the other hand, suggests the media’s presentation of Tracey Wigginton combined the various strands of information regarding her into a seamless whole, whereby her vampirism took on the characteristics of victimism. Her concise summary of the media’s vampire tale observes, for instance, that these reports presented Tracey Wigginton’s life as a ‘battle for

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“nourishment” ’ – not merely for blood, but for love, acceptance and security (1993: 99). This chapter, however, demonstrates that, far from incorporating the image of Tracey Wigginton as a victim, the media defended their narrative of her as a vampire, deliberately undercutting alternative presentations. It will go on to show that this same strategy was in evidence when Tracey Wigginton finally broke her long silence in 1996. Verhoeven also considers the difficulties feminist theorists face in representing this case. For example, she precludes a possible feminist positioning of Tracey Wigginton as a victim on the grounds of the protagonist’s silence at that time (1993: 102); without a detailed statement from the ‘victimized one’ herself any such narrative would be based on mere hearsay or on hypnosis sessions whose content, according to her two psychiatrists, Tracey Wigginton couldn’t and shouldn’t remember. Verhoeven likewise argues against any presentations of Tracey as a feminist avenger who murdered Baldock in symbolic retribution for her suffering at the hands of heteropatriarchy, or as a hysteric, the abject ‘other’ who threatens the patriarchy and heterosexist society with her intractable difference. These interpretations of the case, Verhoeven contends, simply buy into a victimized, and hence powerless, stereotype which romanticizes the traditional silencing and segregation of women who kill (1993: 103). While Verhoeven may be correct in emphasizing the fact that such possible rereadings continue to position Tracey Wigginton outside the mainstream, I argue that she does not give enough consideration to the importance that the rewriting of myths recasting the female as the good and acceptable agent of vengeance has in a society weaned on tales of mythic feminine evil and destructiveness. Nor does she give adequate credence to the vital slip that the presentation of Tracey Wigginton as a victim makes from the realm of the non-human to that of the human, even though she rightly recognizes this depiction’s implied lack of agency. For what was most threatening for the media about this victim persona was its foundation in humanity, its argument that Tracey Wigginton could, as her mother claimed, be both a murderer and a human being (Lamble and Kerr, 17.2.91). Other theorists, such as Susanne Davies and Andrea Rhodes-Little, in ‘History, Sexuality and Power: Deconstructing the “Lesbian Vampire Case” ’ (1993), and Jenni Millbank, in ‘From Butch to Butcher’s Knife: Film, Crime and Lesbian Sexuality’ (1996), have concentrated upon the coupling of lesbianism and violence in this case. Davies argues that legal and media representations demonstrate most effectively the condemnation of those who challenge the ingrained ideology of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Davies and Rhodes-Little, 1993: 16). Predictably, in her opinion, the women’s sexual preference was used to demonize them and to reinforce Tracey Wigginton’s emergence as a ‘monster’, a reincarnation of Cesare Lombroso’s ‘born female criminal’ (cited in Davies and Rhodes-Little, 1993: 21).16 Jenni Millbank concurs, noting that lesbianism provided a most convenient justification for the behaviour of Tracey Wigginton and for that of

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Aileen Wuornos as well, because they killed men and because they murdered in a ‘male’ manner, killing strangers in public places (1996: 461). She elaborates: ‘They were lesbian, so were “like” men and killed like men. They were lesbian, so they hated men and killed men. They were lesbian, so they hated society and the family – represented by “the father” – so they killed men who were father figures’ (1996: 461). A seamless fit between lesbianism and antisocial aggression is hereby effected and reinforced. Indeed, as Millbank further points out, the only stories circulating in popular culture about lesbians involve danger and violence: ‘True stories of jolly nice, nonmurdering, or even heroic lesbians don’t tend to appear in film and, if they do appear, the character’s lesbianism is almost always muted or erased’ (1996: 472). This is in direct contrast to tales of lesbian killers, which are always ‘told and retold [with] their sexuality central to the tale’ (1996: 473). Andrea Rhodes-Little, however, points out that vilification of female violence is by no means confined only to lesbians. She argues that while male violence and brutality are rewritten as ‘the poetic and moral manifestations of sovereign individuality affirming itself and its sacred centre, masculinist civil society’ (Davies and Rhodes-Little,1993: 27), female violence is considered ‘monstrous in the sense of possessing animal (chaotic) desire’ (1993: 25). The hypothesis of the murderer as an extreme example of lone, rugged individualism, which has historical roots in French existentialism, such as in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre,17 does not, cannot, hold when women kill. For, as RhodesLittle observes, ‘[a]gency and desire, when it manifests in a male body (and only when the body is white, heterosexist and male) is valorized, even when it takes the form of murder’ (Davies and Rhodes-Little, 1993: 26, emphasis in original), but when women kill, the ‘centre’ of despotic male power relations disintegrates. Davies and Rhodes-Little’s project is, thus, very similar to my own: to argue for a jurisprudence, a history and representational strategies that acknowledge women’s existence, deconstruct ancient male cultural centrality and privilege, and allow for the portrayal of female desire and female violence. The last essay I wish to discuss considers the fictional strategies employed in the Wigginton case, specifically to expose legal and psychiatric reliance on cultural understandings of myths and archetypes to ‘explain’ occurrences such as Tracey Wigginton’s murder of Edward Baldock. In ‘Tales of Gothic Horror: Queensland’s “Vampire” Murder’ (1994), Christine Higgins demonstrates how horror fiction is deeply legalistic, and how legal narratives of this case were indebted to certain forms of horror fiction, such as the ‘strange case’, in their depiction of Tracey Wigginton’s motives. Focusing particularly on Tracey’s Mental Health Tribunal hearing, Higgins reading shows how this medico-legal text allowed for a re-enactment of mythical archetypes, such as the vampire, the witch, the siren, and the story of Jekyll and Hyde. Indeed, she argues that the very facts in this case are entirely submerged in this hearing transcript by the powerful myths they evoke (1994: 170). Tracey Wigginton’s Mental Health Tribunal hearing no longer remained a legalistic enterprise to discover, via medical means, whether she

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was competent to stand trial, but became an interrogation akin to those documented in the Malleus Maleficarum to determine whether she was a witch, possessed by the devil or a vampire (Higgins, 1994: 171–2). Via this transcript, and press readings of this case, Higgins argues that these ancient myths were granted new currency, allowing audiences in the secular 1990s to understand contemporary unsettling events. The Tracey Wigginton case, in Higgins’ view, highlights the inextricable linkage of sin and evil in the modern West. In the Mental Health Tribunal hearing, the legalistic frame of the hearing supported the theological theme that the devil exists within us and is capable of possessing us, turning us from law-abiding citizens into demonic killers (1994: 178). For the transcript of this hearing, as Higgins observes, reverberates with allusions to horror literature through the psychiatrists’ evidence of their exorcism of Tracey Wigginton via the calling forth of her demons while she was under hypnosis. As such it is a transgressive text, challenging ‘the boundaries between truth and fantasy, fiction and nonfiction, the plausible and the implausible’ (Higgins, 1994: 178). The hearing in effect fictionalizes the supposed factual material in this case, causing the reader to move from belief in the basic facts of the murder to doubt about everything else regarding the circumstances in which that murder took place and the traits and motives of the person who claimed responsibility for it (Higgins, 1994: 178). Tracey Wigginton, in Higgins’ analysis as in my own, emerges as a figure of fantasy, a ‘hard, cold Medieval witch’ (Dr Quinn, Tracey Wigginton’s psychiatrist, cited in Higgins, 1994: 171), a blood-drinking vampire, a poor soul possessed by the devil. The Tracey Wigginton case has thus proven invaluable to feminist theorists as a paradigmatic example of the media’s reportage of female deviance and women who kill, exposing as it does the complex nexus of ideology and belief pertaining to media-defined limits of ‘acceptable’ female behaviour. On this basis, then, the feminist responses considered here found no need to renarrativize the events of the case or to tell new stories about its protagonists. However, since these essays were written, Tracey Wigginton has attempted such a retelling herself, her broken silence spectacularized in the sensational headline ‘Interview with the vampire’ (Riggert, 25.5.96). I wish to explore now the impact of her pronouncements on the mainstream media’s narrative and their potential repercussions for alternative presentations of the case.

Confessions of a vampire: Tracey Wigginton as author Tracey Wigginton finally ended her long silence in an interview with Courier-Mail journalist Ella Riggert, who subsequently told her story in two long articles published on 25 and 27 May 1996, under the banner headline ‘Interview with the vampire’. Riggert’s retelling belies its title, however, and bears little similarity to the accomplices’ sensational tale; instead, it has

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more in common with the psychiatrists’ narrative of childhood abuse and mental breakdown. For although Riggert’s Tracey eschews the MPD diagnosis, her explanation for the crime nevertheless rests on her claim that she simply ‘snapped’ the night she killed Edward Baldock. His murder, she asserts, represented her futile attempt to rid herself of her own demons, gathered after years of trauma and brutality. He was merely an innocent victim of her pent up hatred at the world, accidentally on the receiving end of her explosive vengeance (Riggert, 25.5.96). According to Riggert, Tracey does not trivialize Baldock’s murder, stating ‘ “Nobody has the right to take someone else’s life” ’, and is careful to show proper remorse for her acts, describing herself as persistently troubled by terrible dreams of his killing (Riggert, 25.5.96). In this latest presentation Tracey Wigginton explicitly rejects any connection with Satanism, allegedly telling Riggert she was frightened by the variety of exorcists who arrived at the prison after her arrest to rescue her from the devil (Riggert, 27.5.96). Likewise, she is dissociated from her blood-obsessed guise as a vampire through her reported statements that blood ‘ “physically makes me ill – even a little cut on my finger” ’ (Riggert, 25.5.96). This representation’s rejection of the earlier narrative, and even of her way of life at the time of the killing as a troubled sheetmetal work student, is complete. She is quoted as being dismissive of her murderous self: ‘ “I was off the planet when I killed. I wasn’t even my usual doormat self – I was an animal” ’ (Riggert, 25.5.96). Riggert stresses her subject’s full commitment to extensive counselling and psychiatric treatment, where before she had apparently considered such aid a sign of ‘wimpiness’ (Riggert, 27.5.96). Even her academic pursuits have changed, from sheetmetal work to anthropology and philosophy, at which, we are told, she excels. Her only desires now, so she tells Riggert, are to be left alone and to help others: ‘ “Helping people is something I’d really like to continue with” ’ (Riggert, 27.5.96). All in all, Tracey Wigginton, far from appearing as a mythic figure of evil, is now presented as a fully rehabilitated prisoner who is well on her way to a bachelor’s degree and psychiatric health, while nevertheless displaying the required amount of remorse for her sins and respect for her victim. This latest rendition of Tracey Wigginton overtly insists on her ordinariness; indeed, Ella Riggert, after admitting to her fear and trepidation upon being ‘invited to [her] extraordinary and disturbing meeting’ with the notorious ‘Lesbian Vampire Killer’, claimed surprise at discovering ‘how normal she seems’ (25.5.96). Riggert’s deliberate distancing of Tracey from the popular narrative casting her as a monster, combined with claims of her prison rehabilitation, constitute, however, a greater threat to Australian heteropatriarchy than did Tracey’s silence. For instead of upholding the tale which allowed her society to banish her to the realm of the inhuman, Tracey via Riggert invokes her psychiatrists’ explanation of her crime. Her argument that the pain caused through years of severe childhood abuse

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culminated in a moment of extreme violence, during which she stabbed a stranger to death in metaphorical revenge against all those who had hurt her, shifts the onus for the crime from Tracey Wigginton to those who had harmed her in the past. This is an uncomfortable development for her society, which had sought merely to condemn and forget her. Her bald description of the murder confirms the importance her history played in its commission: ‘ “once I had started [stabbing] I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t see Mr Baldock – I kept seeing my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, my father and all the people in my life who had hurt me” ’ (Riggert, 25.5.96). This narrative forces a recognition that the consequences of abuse, especially the abuse of children, may be frighteningly great. Here we are faced with a woman, described by the interviewing journalist as intelligent, articulate and normal, who was nonetheless so tormented by her past that she wound up murdering a strange man in ‘a frenzy of 27 stab wounds’ (Riggert, 25.5.96) in an effort to cauterize her own pain. Hardly a soothing image, especially when we remember the sheer amount of child abuse and the numbers of abuse survivors. Not that I am suggesting that every survivor has the ability to perform in the way Tracey Wigginton did, but if we accept her story, littered as it is with the commonplaces of brutality, we are also bound to accept that she cannot be entirely unique. Indeed, she drives home the unsettling notion that killing is an option potentially open to all with statements such as: ‘ “Murder is a terrifying experience – it’s extremely scary to have that much power. It’s playing God with life and death. Nobody should have that sort of power … but we all do.” ’ (Riggert, 25.5.96, my emphasis). The irony of this latest instalment in the saga, then, is that in finally speaking, in providing answers to the many ‘whys’ that have plagued those narrating the case, Tracey Wigginton may have made herself an even more threatening figure. As Foucault has demonstrated in works such as Discipline and Punish, the attention given to the author of a crime, the criminal punishable body, has shifted in contemporary Western legal discourse from mere identification of that body to a requirement to ‘know’ the offender (1977: 19). Hence, simple admission of guilt is no longer enough, a full confession is now required. Confession, however, produces a particular kind of authorship. For the criminal who confesses does not ‘claim’ his or her acts as might the author of texts other than the criminal. He or she does not narrate them ‘freely’ and of her or his own accord. Instead, the confessional discourse positions the criminal author in a very specific way. The ideology of the confession, as Foucault observes in The History of Sexuality, insists that it is primarily engaged in ‘the production of truth’ (1976: 58). Yet all confessions occur within power relationships in which power resides with the interlocutor, not with the criminal author; with the one who demands the confession, not with the one who gives it; with the one who desires knowledge, not with the one who knows. This relationship

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has great consequences both for the formulation of the confession and for the purpose it is designed to serve. For the confession is permanently constrained by the interlocutor’s demands: the criminal author provides that information which the interrogator asks of her or him, and through this act the one who asks ‘saves’ the one who tells. Tracey Wigginton, thus, does not so much tell us her own story in this latest narrative, but ‘confesses’ to Ella Riggert, thereby supplying a carefully constructed ‘truth’ adhering to the confines of journalistic style and news values. In giving an interview, yet another media-constructed chimera is produced, even as this tale’s status as ‘confession’ relies on her supposed cooperation in allowing us to ‘know’ her. More particularly, however, her broken silence betrays her desire for salvation: in broadcasting this tale of rehabilitation to the world, Ella Riggert may well aid Tracey Wigginton’s eventual quest for freedom. The possibility that Tracey may be merely adopting the guise of confessing criminal offering knowledge of herself to those in charge of her in order to eventually escape their control entirely only adds to her threat. Especially for those who would persist in their belief in the vampire tale, she may well appear chameleon-like, assuming the roles most congenial to those who decide her fate, while concealing her evil designs. Tracey’s choice of when to confess and to whom can be read as further underscoring such distrust. From a cynical perspective, her maintenance of her silence for six years could be viewed as her protracted wait for the media hysteria and the case’s sensationalism to die down before telling ‘her’ story. Choosing a moment sufficiently removed from the events of the killing, she then decides to ‘confess’ to a journalist rather than giving the legal system its long-desired explanation. The potentially satirical character of this act cannot be underestimated. For in telling her tale to a journalist instead of to her investigating police officers, Tracey Wigginton effectively makes evident the symbiotic relationship between the media and the law. The message is unmistakable: improvements in public image afford more sympathetic legal treatment. Tracey Wigginton’s media ‘confession’, however, is not given the ‘truth function’ which such texts are usually accorded, and nor is it allowed to work to rehabilitate or ‘save’ her. Rather, this attempt at presenting a human, penitent face is persistently undermined by the popular vampire narrative. For manifest in the Courier-Mail’s presentation of her ‘confession’ is the deep suspicion characteristic of those who mistrust another’s purpose. The screaming headlines, ‘Interview with the vampire’ and ‘ “Vampire killer” haunted by smell of her victim’s blood’ (Riggert, 25.5.96), intentionally invoke the vampire Lestat from Anne Rice’s novels and Neil Jordan’s popular film Interview with the Vampire, only recently released in Australia at the time. This comparison, combined with a full rehashing of the gory details of the case and the accomplices’ explanation, serves to deny the credibility of Ella Riggert’s information on the supposedly ‘real’ Tracey

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Wigginton. Reassertion of this earlier vampire narrative tries to force Tracey back into her mythic, fictionalized straitjacket and deny her access to more prosaic, and human, suffering and agency. The media’s need to deny this most recent victim narrative of Tracey is heightened even further because this tale, perhaps unwittingly, provides a qualitatively new version of the vampire. This sympathetic narrative suggests that the societal marginalization of some members (such as unheard abused children, lesbians, gays, criminals, people of colour and so on) to the realm of the non-human, non-subject, creates a class of the eternally unnourished. As vampires also have an overpowering need for nourishment, they can be read as the mythic counterparts of these banished people. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Tracey Wigginton’s vampiric persona could, thus, be seen as the failure of good motherhood, the result of a denial of the good breast, making clear that vampires, while threatening mainstream society, are also produced through its repression of unwanted elements. Ultimately, then, this latest narrative of Tracey Wigginton asks for pity for the vampire, for the undesired, reminding the mainstream audience that her voracity is but the consequence of societal and familial abuse and rejection. Moreover, latent in Tracey Wigginton’s confession, and in the psychiatric narrative which preceded it, is a potential feminist revenge narrative. Although legally such fantasies are not efficacious as legal discourse argues that ‘the Law’ makes vengeance unnecessary (or perhaps substitutes interpersonal vengeance with its institutionalized counterpart), revenge fantasies, as seen in the case of Mrs R., can have much capital in popular forums. Tracey Wigginton’s revenge, however, was more symbolic than literal: she killed a ‘representative’ of those who had hurt her rather than the actual perpetrator. Certainly, her act can inspire a reading such as the one which Deb Verhoeven has canvassed, casting Tracey Wigginton as a legendary anarchist, full of strength and agency, who took a gory revenge on male indifference and brutality towards women (1993: 102–3). Yet this interpretation of Tracey Wigginton’s killing of Edward Baldock is certainly more dangerous to than useful in her attempts to construct a more positive public image. Even the mere implication of this possible narrative in Riggert’s reconstruction of events has only ensured her continued denigration in the mainstream media. The threat of Tracey Wigginton’s symbolic revenge, it seems, utterly destroys any sympathy the popular press might feel in response to her story of abuse.

The persistent popularity of vampires The mainstream media’s determined defence of Tracey Wigginton’s narrativization as a vampire against all later threats to its veracity and credibility betrays, as Deb Verhoeven has observed, ‘their own pathology’ (1993: 126). For the vampire tale was not clung to merely because the accomplices happened to tell it. Rather, it is still important in this case because it

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managed to unify its disparate elements into an other-worldly whole which soothed cultural paranoia through the distancing of its protagonist from mainstream ‘decent’ society. Moreover, it ‘explained’ Tracey Wigginton’s inadequate performance of the gender performatives prescribed and narrated in dominant heteropatriarchal institutions; it ‘justified’ her random choice of a victim; and it acted as a cautionary tale to warn any others who may have thought of following in even one of Tracey Wigginton’s footsteps. Gender performance Certainly, the case of Tracey Wigginton illustrates the complexities of gender performance in the modern West. The hysterical monsterization of her occurred in part because she did not perform her gender according to the expectations and norms for female performance of female gender upheld in the dominant institutions of Western societies. All the various representations of Tracey Wigginton agree on at least one thing: she acted and dressed as a butch lesbian.18 The consternation this caused the mainstream legal and media narrators is revealed in their portrayals of her as a woman virtually masquerading as a man or, in other words, as a quintessential ‘mannish’ lesbian.19 Her subjectivity is thus positioned precariously on the borderline of maleness and femaleness. Judith Butler describes the performative nature of gender not as a ‘singular or deliberate “act” ’ which implies that one merely gets up in the morning and decides which gender to perform on that particular day, but rather as ‘the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ (1993: 2). Tracey Wigginton’s performance of butch lesbianism would, however, appear to have it both ways: although gendered female by her anatomy, she nonetheless enacted a version of male gender behaviour, at least as the male/female binarism is understood in conservative heteropatriarchal discourses. The language used in descriptions of the actual bodies of all four women involved in the case corresponds to the esoteric discourse of the grotesque body which Peter Stallybrass and Allon White discuss in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. The ‘grotesque body’ contrasts with that of the ‘classical body’. The classical body denotes ‘high’ discourses, such as those of ‘philosophy, statecraft, theology and law, and literature, as they emerged from the Renaissance’. The grotesque body, on the other hand, designates ‘the marginal, the low and the outside from the perspective of [this] classical body’ (1986: 22–3). The four women in the Wigginton case were represented as increasingly physically grotesque in line with confirmations of their degree of agency for the crime. In the case of the accomplices, descriptions of bodily grotesquerie corresponded directly with their length of sentence. Accordingly, Lisa Ptaschinski, who received a life sentence for murder, was reported as being larger and more unattractive than Kim Jervis, who received an eighteen-year sentence for manslaughter, which was later reduced to twelve. Kim, in turn,

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was reported as being larger and less attractive than Tracey Waugh, who was acquitted. Lisa was described as ‘a heavily-built woman’ who ‘sat with her arms folded and her face fixed in a malevolent glare’ (Gagliardi, 16.2.91a), while Kim was ‘short and stocky’ and had a ‘dumbfounded’ expression on her face during the trial (Gagliardi, 16.2.91a). Tracey Waugh, however, was ‘the most attractive of the three’ and ‘sat demurely with her wide brown eyes downcast’ while in court. In fact, so well did she resemble ‘the picture of innocence’ that even the prosecutor was moved to comment that the twentythree-year-old woman looked ‘like a 16-year old schoolgirl’ (Gagliardi, 16.2.91a). Needless to say, the most damning representations were reserved for Tracey Wigginton herself. Like a freak at a Victorian fair, she was paraded in the press as the epitome of an unfeminine, unnatural woman, depicted as ‘a 180 cm tall, 110 kg woman with huge buttocks and thighs’ (Lamble, 17.2.91) who ‘had a personality to match her 17 stone frame – big’ (Petersen and Gagliardi, 16.2.91). Her accomplices claimed she was so strong she could kill without a weapon (Sydney Morning Herald, 2.2.91) and her ability to defend herself was legendary according to one unnamed ‘family friend’, who asserted: She could ride a bike as well as any man. She was sitting on the bike and this guy must have said something to her. She jumped off the bike and went for him. She packed him off with his tail between his legs. She wasn’t frightened of anyone. That bit of aggression just backed up the uneasiness I felt about her. (Petersen and Gagliardi, 16.2.91) Even her personality was ‘mannish’ due to its ‘strength’, according to a police officer who interviewed her at the time of her arrest. His reaction is described thus: But he was impressed with the strength of her personality, a voice which – using only two or three words at a time – suggested a commanding presence from which feminism [sic] by its very nature was excluded. (Petersen and Gagliardi, 16.2.91) Tracey Wigginton’s assumed masculinity was further confirmed by her clothing and general mien, which assumed great importance during the trial of the accomplices. Kim Jervis’ defence counsel, for example, questioned no less than four witnesses on what Tracey Wigginton wore, whether she was large, had tattoos, looked ‘mannish’ and was physically powerful (R v Ptaschinski, Jervis and Waugh, 15.2.91). The symbolic value of this defence counsel’s questions regarding Tracey’s appearance was made especially apparent when he asked one of the police witnesses about her tattoos. The man replied that he could not remember having seen any but that he would

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not be surprised if she did have some (R v Ptaschinski, Jervis and Waugh, 15.2.91). In invoking the stereotype of the butch, then, Jervis’ defence counsel clearly relied on common cultural understandings of who lesbians were and what they looked like, reinforcing at every moment their removal from mainstream society and thus their danger to it. In Deleuze and Guittari’s terms, such representations are examples of ‘facialization’, whereby Western society identifies deviance, paradoxically, on a model of sameness. They state that ‘the abstract machine of faciality’ (cited in Fraser, 1999: 152) functions, first, to produce dichotomies from which concrete faces are recognized and identified: ‘it is a man or a woman, a rich person or a poor person’ (cited in Fraser, 1999: 152) and so on, and second, to determine whether or not individual faces pass the deviance test: do they conform to the sameness model or are they suspiciously deviant? As Claudia Card has observed, this machine can also be seen to operate to determine between gay and straight and, more interestingly, between authentic and inauthentic lesbianism and gayness (cited in Fraser, 1999: 152). In the case of Tracey Wigginton and her accomplices, the machine of facialization is clearly functioning at several levels. First, it determines who is ‘properly’ gay and who isn’t: Tracey Wigginton and Lisa Ptaschinski are evidently lesbian because they are ‘butch’, while Kim Jervis is rather more confusing due, perhaps, to her already belonging to the ‘alternative’ Gothic set. Tracey Waugh, on the other hand, is clearly considered nothing more than a straight girl led astray. This means too that of the four Tracey Wigginton is the ‘most authentic’ lesbian, and Tracey Waugh is the ‘most inauthentic’. In facialization discourse, then, Tracey Wigginton is visibly the most deviant as she is recognizably lesbian, while Tracey Waugh is prime rehabilitation material because she is not evidently lesbian. It is very common for mainstream representations of lesbians to deny their femininity. As Barbara Creed has noted in a fascinating essay on lesbian bodies, lesbians have historically been, and occasionally still are, considered in conservative heteropatriarchal discourses as really men trapped in female bodies (1995: 88). Not that this ‘mistake’ diminishes their appeal for the women they court. Rather, according to these discourses their charisma, their ‘fatal’ charm, lies precisely in their gender confusion: they are sexed women, yet gendered masculine, which forces them to ‘masquerade’ as though they were actually sexed men, thus denying their female bodies. This combination of a masculine exterior with the ‘fact’ of a feminine anatomy20 produces the irresistible ‘lure of the mannish lesbian’ (Lauretis, 1991: 15), converting previously heterosexual women to a life without men. Hence, Tracey Wigginton, in her boots, leather and studs, may be read as threatening straight men with their own possible redundancy and inadequacy. Representations of Tracey Wigginton were more complex, however, than mere descriptions of her external appearance. Deb Verhoeven has argued, for instance, that Tracey Wigginton’s portrayals were more gender mobile than simply masculine. She asserts that the media depicted Tracey’s gender as

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context bound, dependent upon the company she kept and even upon the modes of transport she used (1993: 114).21 Her femininity was considered artificial, flung on ‘like a cloak’ when it suited the circumstances (1993: 115). Yet her masculinity was merely imitative, remaining forever only a bad copy of male behaviour (1993: 115).22 In Verhoeven’s account, Tracey Wigginton’s assumption of gender roles empties of significance, appearing as nothing more than a ploy to cover a void within, a vampiric nothingness. For vampires prey on humans, assuming whatever identity is effective in gaining them the nourishment they need. Tracey Wigginton, then, could be anything to anybody due to her other-worldly status as vampire: nothing lay behind her mask other than a desperate hunger. Her status as vampire, however, makes Tracey Wigginton less woman than monster, and thus less gender mobile than mythical. Her reported power to literally destroy men by sucking the blood from their bodies places her in the same male fear-inspiring tradition as such legendary predecessors as the Babylonian Hebrew Lilith, the Greek Empusa and Lamia, and the medieval succubus.23 Her virtual removal of Baldock’s head can be read as an act of castration, amputating the vital male site of reason and logic in a frighteningly real display of (irrational?) female power (Hays, 1966: 141). Her drinking of his blood indicated her intention to retain such power, for, as Brian Frost points out, blood has magical qualities far exceeding those of any other repast: ‘food can maintain life, but only blood can renew it’ (1989: 8). Tracey’s choice of a male victim was also particularly apt as, historically, lesbian vampires desired the blood of men in order to assume their virility (Creed, 1995: 98–9). Somewhat like the female praying mantis, then, she decapitated her male victim even before sex (Grosz, 1995: 283) and, according to the terms of this narrative at least, assuaged her hunger by bathing in his blood. Furthermore, media presentations of Tracey Wigginton generally viewed her as a ‘mannish lesbian’ in the traditional manner noted above, rather than as gender mobile or transgender or even queer. In ‘From Butch to Butcher’s Knife’ (1996), Jenni Millbank notes that lesbians are typically presented in the mainstream media as ‘masculine or “butch” and/or manhating’, rather than as queer or gender mobile, in order to ‘inexorably [tie lesbian sexuality] to aggression and carnality, with murderous and vampiric lesbians the supreme, and most common, embodiment of these traits’ (1996: 455). According to these portrayals, then, Tracey Wigginton only deceitfully masqueraded femininity when and if it suited her, to cover up, or shield, an illegal masculinity. An instance of her deception occurred with her desire to have a child. According to Peter Hansen’s article ‘Vampire killer lost love child’ (10.2.91), Tracey Wigginton ‘sought out a man to make her pregnant so that she and her lesbian lover could have a child’, and engaged in sexual intercourse with him in front of six friends. Tracey, who had always seemed ‘aggressively masculine’ to the man she chose to father her child, apparently was ‘quite feminine’ on the occasion of intercourse, suggesting she merely

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assumed her feminine wiles when she needed to and discarded them again once they were unnecessary. This fraudulence is later reflected in her sexual propositioning of Edward Baldock before she killed him; he was so convinced by her promises that he removed all his clothes while waiting for her on the riverbank. Hence, Tracey Wigginton is not portrayed so much as gender mobile here, but rather as a fraud, a butch lesbian who, on this understanding, would have preferred to be a man but nevertheless took advantage of her generally unwanted femaleness in order to satisfy her unnatural and monstrous desires and lusts. Nevertheless, butch lesbianism is an inherently destabilizing signifier, visibly challenging traditional gender categories. So while Tracey Wigginton’s gender was not presented with the extreme mobility that Verhoeven contends, her consistent portrayal as butch did serve to inadvertently question gender roles and exceed normative female gender performatives as constructed in mainstream legal and media discourses. Certainly, this representation related directly to a common stereotype of ‘butchness’, but it also positioned her outside the world inhabited by ‘decent’ ordinary society. Furthermore, as Judith Butler has argued, the butch’s assumed masculinity denaturalizes the idea of gender, radically questioning the concept of an original ‘sexed’ identity (1990b: 123). If masculinity and femininity are only located in the wearing of certain clothes and acting in specific ways, as the butch’s dress code and behaviour suggest, then these traditionally ‘fixed’ concepts are demonstrated to be nought but style. The butch’s challenge to conservative heteropatriarchal understandings of gender runs deeper, however, than mere sartorial style. For, as Teresa de Lauretis has observed, the butch makes overt an active female desire, shattering long-held notions of a male monopoly on desire and female enjoyment of objectification. Tracey Wigginton remains an enigmatic and challenging figure for heteropatriarchy. For although the press attempted to constrain her image to that of the stereotypical butch, their own discomfort with this portrayal meant that she, seemingly accidentally, wound up being portrayed as someone who wanted to act like a man, yet have a baby like a woman, to actively desire women like a man, yet use a man for sperm when necessary, and, finally, to remain a lesbian even when sexually enticing Baldock into her ‘erotic embrace’ (Creed, 1993: 59) as a vampire. Tracey Wigginton’s abjection was ultimately caused, therefore, through the media’s inability to place her properly within prescribed, non-threatening gender roles; her clearly active female desire combined with the slipperiness of her representation as a butch lesbian demanded the total rejection conferred by the popular, mainstream vampire narrative. Tracey Wigginton’s representation provides a perfect exemplification of Sue-Ellen Case’s argument that the politics of sexuality are deeply entangled with discourses surrounding the separation of life and death. In her essay ‘Tracking the Vampire’ she cogently describes how queer practice and theory

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grew out of the homophobic equation of hetero sex with procreation and thus with life, and homo sex with nought but pleasure, and thus with unlife, if not quite with death, at least until the advent of AIDS. According to Case, the horror genre supports queer practice in deconstructing this opposition of hetero = life/ homo = unlife. For, in one of its most famous clichés, that of the lesbian vampire, lesbianism as unlife contradicts the notion of vampirism as a ‘living death’ (Mansfield, 2000: 115). We cannot reject the dead as our entirely opposite ‘other’; life and death are not so easily divisible, as queer practice, through its ‘unnatural’ desire, shows us. The lesbian vampire, thus, undermines the ‘logic’ of homophobic heteropatriarchy, as Case writes in a passage that could easily be construed as a clever reading of Tracey Wigginton’s enactment of this very archetype: in tracking the vampire, we can here re-imagine her various strengths: celebrating the fact that she cannot see herself in the mirror and remains outside that door into the symbolic, her proximate vanishing appears as a political strategy; her bite pierces platonic metaphysics and subject/object positions; and her fanged kiss brings her the chosen one, trembling with ontological, orgasmic shifts, into the state of the undead. What the dominant discourse represents as an emptying out, a draining away, in contrast to the impregnating kiss of the heterosexual, becomes an activism in representation. (1991: 15) The case of Tracey Wigginton can be inferred, then, as a privileged moment in which the politics of homophobia and queer collide. It forces us to see, as Christine Higgins has partially demonstrated, how fiction, myth and archetype invade our contemporary political struggles over the supposed ‘factual’ domain. It also illustrates how queer practice, far from being an essentially death-affirming ‘lifestyle choice’, is actually so politically and culturally transgressive that it destabilizes the very grounds on which the homophobic discourse of natural/unnatural is founded. Tracey Wigginton, as desiring lesbian who enters representation still ‘only in a guise that proscribes her’ (Case, 1991: 17), remains elusive, a vanishing act, a trace, a momentary recognition, whose very evasion of representational clarity allows her to retain her fearsome power to disrupt comfortable gender and sexuality binarisms. Baldock: feminized victim or canonized innocent? When Tracey Wigginton killed Edward Baldock, she struck at the heart of heteropatriarchy. The supernatural vampire tale was then used to allay male fear caused through the randomness and the savagery of the killing, casting Tracey Wigginton as an other-worldly vampire instead of a flesh and blood lesbian with a history of abuse. Male fear surfaced early in the case when the

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vampire narrative had not yet achieved hegemony. An article in the CourierMail on the day after the women’s arrest, for instance, cited a private investigator/cult specialist’s remark that ‘he had heard of radical lesbians who hated men so much that they would kill them’, adding as evidence of this: I had a friend who went to a lesbian party at South Brisbane and she said some of the women there were unbelievable and would castrate or kill men if they had the chance. (Fitzpatrick, 23.10.89) Male fear is made especially evident in his concluding dire warning: ‘We’re turning into a society of male wimps and we’re at the stage where we’re losing control’ (Fitzpatrick, 23.10.89). Edward Baldock was presented throughout the case as a ‘decent family man’ who had been married for twenty-five years and had several children and grandchildren. His killing replicated in reverse the murders of many women each year: he was picked up on his way home after a night drinking, taken to a park and murdered. However, unlike those many women, Baldock did not have his morals impugned, nor his commonsense in accepting the lift and then the favours questioned. He was not subject to this treatment because of his position as a white, male, heterosexual citizen, traditionally the safest, most respected members of Western heteropatriarchy. His murder was evidently most shocking in its suggestion that the tables may have turned: the streets, which have not been safe for most people for a very long time, were suddenly dangerous for this dominant group as well. The discomfort this unpleasant development caused the male journalists representing heteropatriarchy was made more intense by Baldock’s feminization as a victim. Ironically, Tracey Wigginton’s narrativization as a vampire, which was originally designed to soothe paranoia, only emphasized this powerlessness. Victims of vampires are typically feminized because, as Barbara Creed observes, they are placed in the role of the suckling mother, feeding the vampire/child their blood/milk (1993: 70). Furthermore, because Baldock was a male victim, he encouraged men’s identification with his victimhood, thereby metaphorically placing all men in his symbolically castrated, powerless position.24 His stabbing and slashing rendered the white, male, heterosexual body uncharacteristically and most vexatiously (for those in this category) vulnerable. For Baldock was all victim. The earliest reports on his killing described him in the blandest possible terms, as a ‘mild mannered family man and grandfather’ who ‘never [got] in anyone’s way’ (Gillespie and Hansen, 22.10.89). Later articles were far less flattering, but painted him as similarly unexceptional, depicting a ‘short, balding, beer bellied man’ who clung ‘drunkenly to a light post after a night’s drinking’ prior to his fateful last ride (Gagliardi, 16.2.91a). His apparent lack of machismo was evident even in his last actions. According to police, he ‘carefully, fastidiously folded his clothes checking to see nothing had fallen from

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his pockets’ (MacArthur, 16–17.2.91a) as he waited for Tracey Wigginton to join him for sex, instead of untidily stripping off the way ‘real men’ do, as countless Hollywood fictions would have us believe. His meticulousness is, however, his only claim to any sort of volition and even this was accidental, as the police asserted that he hid the vital clue of Tracey Wigginton’s ATM card thinking it was his own. Apart from this one action, he appears as Tracey Wigginton’s pawn; in the control, as her accomplices claimed they were also, of a higher, supernatural power. Edward Baldock, as Deb Verhoeven has noted, was virtually canonized (1993: 106) in these portrayals. His human agency is literally unimportant because he is portrayed as at the mercy of another’s demonic and monstrous will. His actions are vindicated throughout: he was a ‘helpless’ and ‘harmless drunk’ who ‘innocently accepted a lift’ (and, so it is implied, also innocently accepted the women’s promises of sexual favours) while travelling home to the family to whom he was devoted (Gagliardi,16.2.91a; Riggert, 25.5.96; Gillespie and Hansen, 22.10.89; Courier-Mail, 12.2.91, my emphasis). It is plain to see that his privileged position as a white, male, heterosexual allows him to make choices rigorously disallowed others; had a woman or a gay man made similar decisions to those Baldock made on that fateful night, media-orchestrated sympathy would have been in very short supply. A cautionary tale The vilificatory vampire tale of Tracey Wigginton and her accomplices, so clearly born of male fear and prejudice, can be read as a cautionary tale aimed at young women. Lesbianism, as Millbank has shown, was associated with Satanism and the occult from the earliest days of the case (see, for instance, Fitzpatrick, 23.10.89), and later was made almost synonymous with vampirism as the phrase ‘lesbian vampire killer’ rolled off multiple journalistic tongues. This claim, which, as Millbank observes, was ‘easily made and gladly accepted according, as it did, with a cultural frame of reference which views lesbianism as carnal, contagious and sadomasochistic’ (1996: 460), was insistently used to portray the women’s sexuality as undesirable and extremely dangerous. Women were also cautioned that passivity was vital to their performance of femininity. For passivity was an important part of the accomplices’ defence case. Ultimately, the weaker and more gullible the women were demonstrated to have been, the shorter their sentences became. Thus, the self-destructive and aggressive Lisa Ptaschinski received the longest sentence,25 while Tracey Waugh, the easily led, impressionable ‘schoolgirl’ lookalike, enjoyed an acquittal. Of all the accomplices, Tracey Waugh’s presentation most confirms the moral at the heart of this cautionary tale: women please heteropatriarchy when they are feminine and passive, and are punished when they are not. She fitted the image of Tracey Wigginton’s hostage perfectly. She was the

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youngest of the four, strongly under the influence of her lover Kim Jervis, scared of Tracey Wigginton, and believed herself the ‘reserve victim’ of Tracey’s bloodlust (Sydney Morning Herald, 13.2.91). The press portrayed her as the prettiest of the four (Gagliardi, 16.2.91a), and her legal counsel as a young girl who was ‘particularly vulnerable to Wigginton’s manipulative influence because [she] had just lost her job and was somewhat isolated from the community by her “gay” lifestyle’ (cited in Courier-Mail, 13.2.91). She was also depicted as the most respectable and therefore the most pitiable of the three accomplices. Compared with the likes of Ptaschinski, ‘a poor student [who] was frequently involved in schoolyard brawls’ (Gagliardi, 16.2.91a), and Jervis, ‘a “swampy”: part of a youth subculture with black clothes and nocturnal lifestyles’ (Gagliardi, 16.2.91a), Waugh, ‘a quiet, shy girl who attended St. Rita’s Catholic girl’s school … and later worked as a secretary’ (Gagliardi, 16.2.91a), was the model of a naive middle-class girl who had accidentally aligned herself with the wrong crowd. Her potential heterosexual reclamation was underlined when she ‘fled the court with her parents’ after her discharge, holding tightly to her mother’s hand, leaving her former lover and friends to fend for themselves in prison (Gagliardi, 16.2.91b). Her representation operates interestingly as a Janus face to that of Tracey Wigginton, indicating the precise limits of our society’s facialization of deviant sexuality: Wigginton was the charismatic leader, Waugh the most gullible of disciples;26 Wigginton was the largest of the four, Waugh the smallest; Wigginton was the most powerful, Waugh the least; Wigginton was the most ‘mannish’, Waugh the most feminine. Finally, of course, Wigginton was the most vilified and received the longest sentence, while Waugh was portrayed more sympathetically and set free. The accomplices’ defence of passivity meant, as Jenni Millbank has noted, that only supernatural answers would be proffered to important questions regarding how three adults who had known each other for years came to follow so absolutely the desires of a person they had met only a week or so prior to the killing (1996: 460). Tracey Wigginton’s widely trumpeted ‘lesbian vampirism’ was, thus, a godsend for the accomplices’ legal counsels, effectively deflecting any consideration of their clients’ own possible murderous desires. For in the end Waugh’s acquittal and Jervis’ and Ptaschinski’s convictions were based on whether or not they had helped Tracey Wigginton, not on whether they had manifested homicidal intent of their own. Journalists defended this cautionary tale to the exclusion of other interpretations of the events of the case because it served two primary functions. First, it associated the actions of the women involved with bizarre, mythic phenomena, thus distancing them from the realms of the human, the ordinary and the ‘decent’. Second, it reasserted male control through its warning to young women of the price they might be expected to pay if they strayed from the path of the straight, right and narrow. Male fears of random violence, inadequacy and redundancy were thereby allayed: the killers were

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not ‘women’ at all but a ‘lesbian gang’ of supernatural vampires who hated men (Gillespie and Hansen, 22.10.89); and the assumed contagion of lesbianism, transmitted via the ‘lure of the mannish lesbian’, was supposedly stemmed through repeated alignments of this sexual preference with danger, aggression and pathology (see particularly Kerr, 17.2.91).

Conclusion This discussion has posited the Tracey Wigginton case as transitional in this study, as it evinced both recuperative strategies similar to those found in cases where battered women have killed, and overt rejections common to cases such as those of Valmae Beck and Karla Homolka to be discussed in Chapter 5. This case was also especially useful for demonstrating the denial of agency present in both manoeuvres. Mainstream legal and media discourses rejected Tracey Wigginton and denied her agency through monsterization and mythification. Psychiatric discourses, on the other hand, attempted to recuperate her through the non-agentic representation of victim. The liminal status of the case of Tracey Wigginton and the ‘lesbian vampire’ killing means that it can be read as both ‘socially peripheral and symbolically central’, to borrow a phrase from Stallybrass and White. Acts or persons considered within a society to be deviant or transgressive are marginalized and dismissed as peripheral to the interests of society in general, yet this very marginalizing illustrates the values and the dynamics of symbolic processes central within that same society. As Marcel Détienne has said: ‘To discover the complete horizon of a society’s symbolic values, it is also necessary to map out its transgressions, its deviants’ (cited in Stallybrass and White, 1986: 19–20). The Tracey Wigginton case was rendered socially peripheral through the distancing and monsterizing of its protagonist. It is symbolically central because it demonstrates the workings of hegemony. It poignantly illustrates the values of dominant Australian society through the persistent elevation of concepts such as heterosexuality, ‘decent’ society, ‘family men’ and female passivity, and the denigration of others such as lesbianism, deviance and female violence. This case also has much to tell about ancient fears and contemporary strategies for their management. In particular, it shows that the reasons underlying modern anxieties regarding vampires are more important for analysis than the beliefs themselves. The persistence of the cautionary vampire tale as the preferred journalistic interpretation of this case, even in the face of viable alternative representations, demonstrates clearly the popular media’s desire to leave Tracey Wigginton in the realm of the mythic rather than to acknowledge and confront her human agency. This narrative, as has been shown throughout this chapter, operates to soothe male fears even as it paradoxically assumes the threatening shape of a Hollywood horror movie. The abject nature of Tracey

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Wigginton’s crime is largely responsible for her case’s menacing character. For, according to the vampire tale, she not only produced a corpse from a member of the most privileged group in heteropatriarchal society, but also allegedly bathed in and drank his blood, covering herself in the utter abjection of death and escaped bodily fluids. Her story thus follows the classic format of the horror film. As Barbara Creed has observed, such films attempt ‘to bring about a confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes, the monstrous–feminine) in order finally to eject the abject and redraw the boundaries between the human and the non-human’ (1993: 14). Accordingly, Tracey Wigginton’s gruesome activities as a media-narrated vampire were at first thoroughly and luridly described down to their finest detail, only to culminate in her complete rejection. Her monstrosity was insistently used to denote ‘our’ normality, her evil to demonstrate ‘our’ implied good, her supernatural inhumanity to indicate ‘our’ humanity. The recuperative MPD narrative was clearly ineffective in such a climate of hostility, relying, as it did, on a victimology thesis that suggested that Tracey Wigginton was not responsible for her actions. Her most recent narrative of events has likewise fallen on deaf media ears. Even though it provided the long desired ‘confession’, Tracey Wigginton’s ‘own’ story has not changed the shape, nor the popularity, of the original vampire tale. This situation may have transpired because of the circumstances of her narration: instead of ‘confessing’ to a recognized public confessor, like prison or legal authorities, Tracey Wigginton chose to unburden herself to a journalist, immediately arousing suspicions of her motives and her integrity. The possibility that the entire exercise was merely an attempt to secure public sympathy in the hopes of an eventual release would not be unusual for someone in her position. The story’s presentation, of course, tended to quash this potential, as it reinstated the hegemonic power of the vampire narrative with every headline. Yet, even if her desire to make amends is not fully appreciated, her story still awakens anxieties through its overt challenge to a society in which child abuse is endemic. For even if the most cynical of readers do not accept her tale of her own violent history, her implied warning that eventually the oppressed and beaten strike back at the culture which has historically ignored them could not fail to worry. Indeed, this threat may grow even greater if the appeal of the revenge fantasy narrative of Tracey Wigginton is taken into account. The threat of radical and violent feminism is not to be discounted in a society still clinging to patriarchal ideals.

5

Beyond villainy The ‘limit’ cases of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck

Introduction The two cases which are considered in this chapter travel the final step on the journey this book charts from the relatively contained safety of the victimized female killer to the incomprehension and fear evoked by the female sadist. The cases of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck differ from those cases previously discussed in several aspects. The most overt of these differences is that these women killed in partnership with their male lovers. The most important is that these female killers were subject to extreme vilification and denials of agency on the part of mainstream legal and media discourses and to profound silence on that of feminist legal and media discourses. They offer the least possibility for recuperation in any of these discourses, as cases such as theirs exceed the bounds of ‘common’ villainy.1

Feminism’s ‘limit’ cases While mainstream discourses’ portrayals of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck veered between their condemnation as monsters and their depiction as masochistic victims under the control of their evil partners, feminist cultural studies and legal theorists were notably silent. This silence, although hardly unusual, as I shall demonstrate shortly, was nevertheless seemingly at odds with the primary aims of feminist legal theory and analyses of cultural constructions of Woman and female gender performance. In the case of violent women, feminist legal theorists, in particular, have concentrated on breaking down the deleterious effects of the double jeopardy they face, principally through emphasizing contextual factors which may have influenced their actions and diminishing the importance of the conventional stereotypical ways in which women are usually represented. Often it is through subversion of traditional feminine roles and stereotypes that feminist theorists and advocates aim to promote understanding of individual women’s case histories, and hence to lessen discrimination against women in general. However, in so doing, it seems a dichotomizing of cases acceptable to feminist intervention has occurred.

Beyond villainy 135 Women whose activities betray a more feminist or autonomous perspective find themselves the subjects of further feminist legal analysis, as do those who have engaged in violent acts perceived as the consequence of previous abuse. So the selection of violent women acceptable to and therefore discussed within feminist legal theory thus depends upon the offender’s personal politics and the type of violence committed. These dual images of women correspond to two different varieties of contemporary feminism. In Jane Gallop’s terms, these are ‘victim feminism’ and ‘power feminism’. Victim feminism has grown out of the politics and activism of second wave feminists and tends to emphasize the restrictions operating in women’s lives under heteropatriarchy. Power feminism, on the other hand, is often promoted by third wave feminists, or postfeminists, and ‘explores women’s potential’, proposing that ‘what women need is to recognize, enjoy and enhance our power’ (Gallop, 1997: 71). The lack of response to women like Homolka and Beck who don’t inspire sympathy as victims, or celebration as powerful avengers, is profound. Female murderers who commit violence against children or young women are subject to a ‘deafening silence’ (Birch, 1993: 34) from most feminist critics unless their crimes be named infanticide.2 The omission of sexually violent women tells much, then, about the construction of the violent woman within feminist theory, particularly within feminist legal theory.3 Homolka, Beck and others like them are not included in many feminist discussions of violent women because they cannot be made to fit feminist constructions of the violent female subject. Women who engage in violent crimes against other younger women, therefore, form the ‘limit’ cases of feminist theory on female violence. For they not only dismantle commonsensical notions of heterosexual romantic love, but also shatter irrevocably the stereotypes of femininity, exposing the bounds within which constructions of the feminine are erected. Mainstream law and media responded to the challenge that the cases of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck represented with their usual strategy of denying the women’s humanity and agency. On the one hand, they relied on vilificatory portrayals excluding Homolka and Beck from ‘decent’ humanity and, on the other, they invoked masochistic victim narratives which denied female accountability. Helen Birch, in her study of the case of convicted English child murderer Myra Hindley,4 observes that depictions of her also alternated between the feminine and passive stereotype of the innocent dupe and the devious and monstrous image of the evil manipulator.5 She argues that the polarized representations of femininity which cases of female sadism produce have ‘resonances for all women’ (1993: 34), simultaneously depicting the horror of femininity perverted and making evident the contradictions in any such construction of what femininity means. This transgression might seem both fascinating and useful for feminist theorists interested in interrogating methods of subject constitution within feminist discourses, yet it appears the very reason for these cases’ neglect.

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The two cases discussed in this chapter thus have more significance for their exclusion from feminist theorizing than for their representation in mainstream discourses. For in their exclusion they reveal a lacuna in feminist theorizing on female violence. Their apparent unacceptability has much to tell about what is acceptable in feminist discourses on female criminality; their invisibility highlights what and who is visible; their silencing makes manifest those who are allowed to speak.

‘A child is being beaten (I am looking on)’: the beating fantasy, spectatorship and female sadism This chapter draws upon psychoanalytic theory to attempt to discover reasons for the particular treatment, or lack thereof, these case studies received from mainstream and feminist legal and media discourses. Psychoanalysis seemed most apposite to the study of these cases as several of the narrations of the behaviour of both female protagonists echoed Freud’s articulation of female masochism, the beating fantasy. This fantasy provided a stock story on which mainstream discourses based their denials of the women’s agency. However, Homolka’s and Beck’s unconscious reiteration of the beating fantasy in their own narratives of their behaviour also made evident that which is most threatening, unwittingly unearthing the suppressed, in this fantasy. For this reason, it offers much that helps to explain feminist discourses’ silence regarding these cases as well. Freud’s essay ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, written in 1919, remains perhaps the most important individual work on female masochism.6 In this essay Freud composed three-act dramas to explain the genesis of two varieties of masochism labelled female and male.7 The beating fantasy which is of most concern in this chapter is the female fantasy which Freud developed during his work with four female patients. The sequence that the three phases of this fantasy follow runs thus: Phase 1: ‘My father is beating the child (whom I hate).’ Phase 2: ‘I am being beaten by my father.’ Phase 3: ‘A child is being beaten. (I am probably looking on.)’ (Freud, 1919a: 113–14) It is important to distinguish this fantasy from the more commonly analysed male fantasy, whose three acts are denoted: Phase 1: ‘I am being beaten by my father.’ Phase 2: ‘I am loved by my father.’ Phase 3: ‘I am being beaten by my mother.’ (Freud, 1919a: 126–7)

Beyond villainy 137 The first phase of the female fantasy possibly takes the form of a conscious memory which allows the beating fantasy to develop, rather than being part of the fantasy itself. The child might recollect or have desired their father’s beating of another child in order to prove that he does not love the beaten child but only the one who watches, the unbeaten: ‘My father does not love this other child, he loves only me’ (Freud, 1919a: 115). This phase is aggressive, rather than properly sadistic, as it is presexual and hence not attached to sexualized fantasy and masturbatory activity (Laplanche, 1995: 119). In the second act the child takes on the masochistic role of the beaten child and so does penance for her aggressive and incestuous desires for her father’s love in the first act. However, as the child derives intensely pleasurable feelings from this phase, she continues to evince desire for the father. Repression of this desire is, in Freud’s terms, unavoidable, and therefore the content of this phase is entirely suppressed and is not remembered by the subject. This phase, thus, must be reconstructed by the therapist. Nevertheless, it indicates the true beginning of the beating fantasy, as it is not an actual memory but a fantasy and involves sexual excitation. The last act is the primary focus of the conscious beating fantasy. Now the identities of both beater and beaten are disguised and the child takes on the position of spectator once again, removed from the action. It is important to note here that the sentence denoting this final phase is intentionally indeterminate, indicating that the watching child can identify in either a masochistic or sadistic way.8 At first glance, Freud’s explication of female masochism via the beating fantasy may seem inappropriate. After all, as he himself observes, the form of this fantasy in girls is undeniably potentially sadistic: the girl is apparently gaining pleasure from watching others being beaten in the final conscious phase of the fantasy. However, Freud argues that the satisfaction the girl experiences at this point is masochistically derived (1919a: 119), as her pleasure in being beaten herself in the repressed second stage means that in the latter stage she derives pleasure only through her identification with the beaten child. He even questions the sadism of the fantasy itself, arguing that as she is not doing the beating herself, her fantasy is not strictly sadistic. Yet a problem with this interpretation remains in her unquestionable pleasure in the consciously remembered first stage of the fantasy, where she enjoyed watching her father beat another child. Freud claims that the sadism this act betrays transforms into masochism due to the operation of guilt, which enforces repression of the girl’s incestuous love for her father. Masochism grows out of sadism, then; indeed, it is nothing more than the turning around of sadism on to oneself (Bonaparte, 1995: 433; Freud, 1977: 71; Freud, 1915: 128). The girl in the fantasy must move from being an actively and sadistically desiring participant to being a passive spectator, identifying with the masochistic child yet crucially remaining uninvolved in the action. She has to make this move because she is biologically and genitally predisposed to

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do so. For female masochism is, in Freud’s conception, characteristic of the passivity of femininity. It is, therefore, impossible for a woman to be anything other than a masochist; her masochism is merely constative, not performative (Hart, 1998: 89). Yet Freud’s transformation of female sadism to masochism, according to Michelle Massé’s study In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic, is illogical, even in his own terms. She points out that, particularly in his two essays on femininity,9 Freud observes that women develop a relatively weak superego formation because the threat of castration which serves to produce this sense of conscience in the boy is useless in the case of the girl, who is already symbolically castrated. As feelings of guilt and shame stem from the operation of the superego, women thus possess a diminished capacity for these emotions (1992: 69). It is aberrant therefore, claims Massé, for the girl’s sense of guilt to be so effectively evolved in this one instance (1992: 69–70). This critique effectively leaves the door open for a suggestion that perhaps this transformation from sadism to masochism, upon which Freud is so adamant, is not as complete nor as neatly resolved as he insists. The main impediment to any complete transformation of the girl’s sadism to masochism lies in her spectatorship in the final phase of the drama. In order for the girl to be entirely masochistic at this point, the activity in which she engages in watching must be negated. Spectatorship is hardly passive, although it may appear so to those being watched. Instead, it can betray a myriad of desires, such as scopophilia and epistemophilia, which position the spectator as a participant hungry for knowledge and visual gratification. In terms of the beating fantasy, the first problematic characteristic of the watching woman in the final phase is that of identification. Freud’s ambivalent wording of this act leads to a risk that the female spectator, the previously beaten, may in her turn identify with the beater and repeat her own oppression, beating those she considers more powerless than herself, such as other women and children (Massé, 1992: 61–2). Merely watching a beating will not avoid this risk, for spectators are not uninvolved in the spectacles they observe and nor are they lacking in voyeuristic power. Even though Freud has attempted to avoid acknowledgement of this destructive potential of the beating fantasy, then, it is nevertheless implicit in his own prevarication. Furthermore, spectatorship is inherently sadistic in the sense that the will to know is to some extent a will to power commonly associated with sadism (Bonaparte, 1995: 436).10 The spectator is, after all, removed from the action, safe from victimization. Her special position allows her to see more than either of the participants involved. Her desire to look and to know, her scopophilia and epistemophilia, thus provide her with forbidden knowledge, information even outside the realm of experience of the beater, and this can be a powerful position for such a spectator (Massé, 1992: 41). Due to its power, looking has long been considered a male preserve, while the female gaze, on the other hand, has a lengthy history of fearsomeness. As Teresa de Lauretis has noted, a woman must not look, for if she does, ‘the

Beyond villainy 139 spectacle provokes, castration is in the air’; instead, she must ‘absorb … herself on the side of the seen, seeing herself seeing herself’ (1984: 135). Her ‘proper place’ therefore lies in narcissism and exhibitionism, while women who engage in the sadistic act of spectating are abominations. The woman in Freud’s beating fantasy, however, appropriates the forbidden look. So, while the beating fantasy can be interpreted as an exercise in masochism, it can also be viewed as an articulation of women’s culturally suppressed sadism. Its usage as confirmation of women’s ‘natural’ passivity and masochism is, therefore, debatable and indicative of the unstable foundations of these crucial characteristics of traditional stereotypes of femininity. For Freud’s work has been enormously influential in modern Western heteropatriarchy and still grounds mainstream constructions of ‘good’ womanhood.11 The beating fantasy’s centrality to Freud’s construction of the feminine thus maintains a crucial role in contemporary mainstream constructions of Woman. Freud’s detailing of normative femininity is anchored in his interpretation of this fantasy; his insistence on women’s inherent masochism is founded on his elision of their potential for sadism; his belief in female passivity stems from his decision that this fantasy demonstrates women’s lack of active desire. Perhaps his uncanny ability to describe so accurately the beliefs and desires of male dominant society partially accounts for his work’s tacit popularity within the discourses emanating from its major institutions. However, the ambivalence at the heart of his construction of the female beating fantasy also serves to destabilize the limited and limiting mainstream performatives of female gender which have been based upon it. More contemporary understandings of masochism also shake the foundations of female passivity. For, while Freud may have clung to the notion that masochism is inherently powerless, modern commentators do not agree. Indeed, masochism is not generally presented as the weaker of the sadomasochistic duality (Sacher-Masoch, 1989: 183). Even more crucially, many modern theorists disavow entirely any complementarity between sadism and masochism. Far from agreeing with Freud that masochism is born of sadism, these commentators insist that the two are completely different identities, demanding different activities and fulfilling different pleasures. The feature which distinguishes sadism from masochism, as Giles Deleuze and others note, is that masochism always involves a contract between the sadomasochistic partners, in which the masochistic ‘victim’ controls their tortures at the hand of the sadomasochist (Deleuze, 1989: 77; Žižek, 1999: 148). The sadomasochist, thus, is ‘the employee of the masochist’, there to do the bidding of that masochist (Smirnoff, 1995: 66). Sadism, on the other hand, involves no such contract, as the sadist requires the non-consent of the victim, enjoying his or her own private pleasure rather than providing pleasure for the victim (Smirnoff, 1995: 66). Hence, the two do not inhabit the same universe, as ‘a genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim … and the genuine masochist doesn’t want a sadistic torturer’ (Deleuze, 1989: 40–41).

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Such a distinction creates problems, then, for Freud’s assumed transmogrification of sadism to masochism in the female beating fantasy. For if true sadism, as the authors of a popular text on sadomasochism claim, is as different from the sadomasochistic scene as it is from mainstream society (Brame et al., 1997: 43), then perhaps the scopophilic pleasure identified in the beating fantasy is equally as far from passive femininity. The sadism of the beating fantasy might be as much a part of womanhood, therefore, as the powerful masochistic delights already assumed essential to the maintenance of the traditional feminine. The cases of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck are interesting to view through the lens of the beating fantasy, as the women’s own narratives of their behaviour correspond very closely to Freud’s three-act drama: both women claim to have watched their partners rape and murder young women. However, Homolka and Beck also actively participated in the ‘beating’, raping the young girls themselves. In this way, then, they embody the terrifying potential hidden in the beating fantasy: that women will enact their sadistic desires on the body of someone less powerful than themselves. In unwittingly declaring themselves female sadists, Homolka and Beck ensured their vilification and later reinterpretation at the hands of mainstream discourses. For these discourses followed Freud’s lead and rewrote their stories as tales of female masochism, where both women were under the control of their more powerful, sadistic husbands. Feminist discourses, on the other hand, preferred to ignore their existence altogether. Unravelling the threads of these contemporary beating narratives will help elucidate the reasons for this silence.

Raping virgins Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo12 Karla Homolka, with her partner Paul Bernardo, was convicted of the abduction, rape and murder of two teenage girls, and of the drugging and rape of her younger sister, in St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada, in 1993. The couple first drugged Karla’s sister, Tammy, with an anaesthetic and sleeping pills, and raped her while she slept on 23 December 1990. Tammy then accidentally died due to the drugs. In January 1991 Paul Bernardo brought a hitchhiker back to the house he shared with the Homolka family and sexually assaulted her. Only Karla was aware of his activities. Karla and Paul then moved into their own house, and on 7 June 1991 they both drugged and sexually assaulted a young friend of the late Tammy Homolka. In the early hours of 15 June 1991 Paul kidnapped 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy. He and Karla sexually assaulted the teenager until Paul strangled her in the morning of 16 June 1991. Leslie’s body was then dismembered, encased in concrete and dumped into a lake. Karla and Paul were married shortly after, on 29 June 1991. Leslie’s body parts were discovered on 30 June 1991. In

Beyond villainy 141 late July 1991 the couple drugged and assaulted the same young friend of Tammy’s for the second time. On 16 April 1992 Karla and Paul kidnapped 15-year-old Kristen French and kept her as a ‘sex slave’ in their house until 19 April 1992, when Paul strangled her. Kristen’s body was dumped in bushland and was not discovered until 30 April 1992. Most of the sexual assaults on all the girls were videotaped. Karla eventually left Paul on 5 January 1993, after a particularly savage beating at his hands. She negotiated an agreement with the police in exchange for her testimony, as at this time the videotapes of the assaults were missing. At her trial Karla pled guilty to all charges and, on 6 July 1993, was sentenced to two concurrent maximum sentences of twelve years for the manslaughter of Leslie and Kristen. She divorced Paul on 25 February 1994. The videotapes were finally handed to the police by one of Bernardo’s lawyers in February 1995. Paul’s trial commenced on 1 May 1995. He was convicted of both murders and rapes, and, on 1 September 1995, was given a life sentence with no parole for twenty-five years. He subsequently filed an unsuccessful appeal on 8 September 1995. Valmae Beck and Barrie Watts13 Valmae Fay Beck, with her partner Barrie Watts, abducted, raped and murdered a 12-year-old girl in Noosa, Queensland, in 1987. Apparently, Watts had become fascinated with the idea of raping a virgin ‘for the first and last time’ some eighteen months before Sian Kingi happened along their path on 27 November. Beck finally agreed to assist Watts in the rape because he insisted this was the only way for her to save their marriage. However, she claimed she did not realize he also meant to murder the girl. Accordingly, on the afternoon of the 27th, Beck caught Sian Kingi’s attention as she was cycling through a park and helped Watts abduct her. She then drove the child to a nearby forest, where Watts raped and sodomized her repeatedly, stabbed her to death, and finally threw her body into bushland. Upon their arrest two weeks later, Beck confessed all in a lengthy interview and showed police where she had disposed of the knife, rope and blanket used in the murder. She was tried, pled guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder, ten years for rape and three years for deprivation of liberty. Watts, who pled not guilty, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder, fifteen years for rape and three years for deprivation of liberty.

Women who rape These brief narrations of the ‘facts’ of each case depict Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck as spectators, at the very least, of their male partners’ rapes and murders of young girls. However, their own accounts attest that their

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involvement went far beyond voyeurism, making overt their active and sadistic participation. In her record of interview with her arresting police officers (cited in R v Valmae Beck, 19.10.88) Valmae Beck depicts herself as playing a crucial role in Sian Kingi’s abduction and rape. The girl was initially distracted from riding home because Beck asked for her help in locating a French poodle which she claimed had run into the nearby park. (Beck’s dog, a Blue Heeler, was tethered inside the car at this time.) Her action allowed Watts the opportunity to sneak up behind the victim and force her into their car, where she was bound and gagged. When they reached the state forest, Beck undid Sian’s dress so that Watts could see her breasts and replaced the tape around her mouth. She then tied up Sian’s ankles so she couldn’t run away and removed Sian’s dress and pants entirely. After rubbing Watts’ penis to make it erect, Beck gave instructions to Sian to suck it and later assisted him in penetrating the girl. When Watts began strangling their victim, Beck removed their dog, which had begun growling and barking, and returned to watch the killing. She then helped Watts dispose of evidence, drove home with him and washed their clothes. Far from merely watching from afar, then, Beck’s narrative demonstrates her vital participation. Without her help, so she implies, Watts could never have fulfilled his dream of ‘raping a virgin’. The suggestion that Valmae Beck enjoyed her activities, rather than endured or was sickened by them, is found in the transcript of a secretly taped conversation between herself and Watts in the Noosa police cells prior to their arraignment.14 Her comments show her to have been a willing participant in the rape of a schoolgirl, although not happy about her murder, as she states: ‘ “going out and raping somebody is one thing but to kill somebody in cold blood and not have any compassion at all. That worried me. It’s been worrying me for weeks” ’ (Valmae Beck and Barrie Watts, Transcript of ‘Interview’, 14.12.87). Certainly, Watts was apparently unaware that his partner held any qualms about the rape of a 12-year-old, as in this same conversation he made his own desire to ‘do it again’ quite clear, and insisted that Beck felt the same, telling her: ‘ “You wanted to as well. You wanted to do it again.” ’ As Beck did not respond verbally to this statement, it is not known whether she agreed with it. The possibility of Beck’s enjoyment was again raised in her testimony in Watts’ trial. In its unusually intense preoccupation with the minutiae of her involvement, her account of the abduction, rape and murder of Sian Kingi reads like pornography. Beginning with her statement that Watts asked her to help with the rape, but did not physically threaten or coerce her to participate, Beck’s evidence continues for page after page of court transcript with intimate descriptions of Watts’ rapes, Sian Kingi’s reactions and expressions, Watts’ words both to herself and to the child, as well as her own aid in these crimes. Nor was this the first time she had provided such a comprehensive account. Her police confession was similar in length and detail. Indeed, so

Beyond villainy 143 careful was she in her narration that Watts said to her in the cell conversation: ‘ “Why didn’t you just say that I just raped her? … Why did you have to tell them everything?” ’ (Valmae Beck and Barrie Watts, Transcript of ‘Interview’, 14.12.87). The police, too, were reportedly surprised by her extensive record of events, which eventually ran to twenty-nine pages exclusively on the hour the two spent raping and murdering Sian Kingi (McGregor, 11.2.90).15 The extraordinary amount of detail Beck provided is evident in this excerpt from her testimony in Watts’ trial, when she describes his first rape of the girl: He asked her again if she was a virgin and she said yes, and he said, ‘Well, you damn well better be.’ Then she went and laid on the blanket, and he went and laid down beside her, and he started to kiss her on the lips and on the breasts, and he told her at that stage that he was going to rape her. … I think he said that he was going to fuck her now. … I think she [the girl] said, ‘Please, don’t hurt me.’ I think he told her to shut up, that he would do what he liked. My memory has gone blank. … He laid her – she was laying [sic] on her back, and he wanted to have sex with – or to fuck her, and he was having trouble because he couldn’t get it in. His penis went soft, and he told her to play with it, to make it hard, and she did this. He also told her that she had to suck it because it still wouldn’t go in, so he laid down on his back and she was sort of half sitting, and she sucked his penis to make it hard again. (R v Barrie Watts, 29.1.90)16 Arguably, her apparent desire to communicate this narrative of rape and murder with such exhaustive pedantry reveals more than her desire merely to do as she was bidden. Her shockingly unabridged reminiscences may suggest her own obsessive pleasures even as they are used to incriminate Watts. For Beck describes both her scopophilic desire to watch the rape and murder and her sadistic enjoyment in aiding their commission. Beck in effect restages Sian Kingi’s abuse for the court through this narrative, thereby inevitably proliferating its impacts and circulating its hateful rhetoric far beyond either its original, or even its legal, contexts (Butler, 1997: 14). Her story, as Catherine MacKinnon has previously argued regarding evidence of rape victims in trials, ‘gives pleasure in the way that pornography gives pleasure … it draws attention to the sexualized body [of the victim] … [and] becomes a pornographic vignette’ in the process (cited in Smart, 1989: 39). Valmae Beck’s very thorough report of events is silent, however, upon her own sexual abuse of Sian Kingi, even though she was convicted of rape. For instance, she is recorded as having said to Watts during her conversation in the police cells: ‘ “The only thing I didn’t put in the statement was what happened between her and me. … I just couldn’t tell them that” ’ (Valmae Beck and Barrie Watts, Transcript of ‘Interview’, 14.12.87). Watts’ reply is

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also instructive. He stated: ‘ “That’s quite understandable. … I’m glad you didn’t [tell them]” ’ (Valmae Beck and Barrie Watts, Transcript of ‘Interview’, 14.12.87). Nevertheless, her trial judge considered her participation to extend beyond voyeurism, ultimately punishing her ‘willing assistance’ in the rape and murder with a severe sentence (R v Valmae Beck, 19.10.88). As was the case with Valmae Beck, the politics of Karla Homolka’s specularity was a constant theme. The question as to whether Karla actually witnessed events was, of course, vital to the case, but the implications of her having done so quickly became almost more important. For the look held the promise of her possible agency in, and therefore accountability for, the crimes, something she became increasingly desperate to avoid. She claimed, for instance, that she stood in a doorway and watched while Paul killed Leslie and Kristen. She claimed that she also watched him assault them and the other victims. She claimed she helped him videotape the assaults, but disagreed with Paul that they watched those tapes over and over again. Rather than admitting his assertion that the tapes were an essential part of their sexual fantasy life (Duncanson, et al. 22.8.95), she insisted that she got no joy out of watching their repetition (Paul Kenneth Bernardo v Queen, 1.5.95). Indeed, she stated that she had not even seen some of the tapes in police possession. Karla’s troublesome gaze was quickly neutralized through her assertion that although she had clearly seen numerous horrific assaults on young girls, performed both by herself and by her ex-husband, she had developed a knack of looking but not seeing. Swaddled in this convenient ‘defence mechanism’, she was then able to sit impassively through courtroom re-screenings of her rape of Tammy (Pearson, 1998: 193) and through a video of the rape of a young friend of Tammy’s, known only as Jane Doe, in which she ‘smiles for the camera and sticks her tongue out saucily … [even] employ[ing] one of the hands of the unconscious victim … to stimulate herself sexually’ (Makin, 24.6.95). As she observed to Ray Houlahan: ‘ “I look at [such videos] and my eyes just stop seeing. It’s not something I can control” ’ (Makin, 24.6.95). Her need to vindicate her role thus clearly encompasses any and every involvement she had in the rapes and murders, including even her capacity to witness acts clearly recorded on tape. Karla Homolka’s enjoyment of her activities with Paul Bernardo was nevertheless evident in hour after hour of those home-made tapes.17 Apart from the very first such video, made of the rape and sodomy of her sister Tammy, Karla never once flags in her depicted enthusiasm for the sexual assault of helpless young girls. In tape after tape of assaults on Jane Doe, Leslie and Kristen, Karla can be seen laughing lasciviously, waving gaily at the camera, licking her lips, actively engaging in her own rapes of the girls and aiding Paul’s commission of anal and vaginal rapes. She even held a videotaped discussion with Paul on one notorious tape, later titled the ‘fireside chat’ video, made just three weeks after Tammy’s death, in which she

Beyond villainy 145 stated she would help him kidnap virgins as young as 13 for them to rape; and that she enjoyed both her own and his rape of Tammy (Pron and Duncanson, 2.6.95; Cairns and Burnside, 2.6.95). Her willing participation in the assaults is, thus, abundantly clear, despite the claims of the prosecution that Paul battered her into submission. Karla Homolka was not convicted of the sexual abuse of any of her victims due to the absence of the incriminating video tapes at her trial. Her extraordinarily light sentence reflected only her involvement in the two murders. At Paul’s trial the prosecutor, Ray Houlahan, stated that had the tapes come to light earlier, Karla would have been tried for first degree murder along with her husband (Paul Kenneth Bernardo v Queen, 1.5.95; Makin, 30.8.95). These statements and tapes would seem to provide evidence, then, that Homolka and Beck went beyond the voyeurism of the final stage of the beating fantasy and became sadists themselves. For their activities with their victims evidently demonstrate sexual pleasure that is ‘conditional on the humiliation and maltreatment of the [sexual] object’, which describes sadistic perversion (Bonaparte, 1995: 432). Their evolution suggests most powerfully, therefore, that the female beating fantasy is not entirely about masochism; their pleasure in causing pain makes overt the beaten’s potential transformation into the beater.18

Homolka and Beck: sadists or masochists? voyeurs or victims? Mainstream media and legal discourses responded to innuendoes of Karla Homolka’s and Valmae Beck’s possible sadism in a typically hysterical manner. On the one hand, they vilified the women, considering them inhumanly evil and more wicked than their male partners.19 On the other, they hurriedly scrambled to rewrite their tales as ones of loving self-sacrifice or, in other words, to recast the two as masochists. The intense vilification which followed the arrest of Valmae Beck and the conviction of Karla Homolka makes evident the severity of their sins against heteropatriarchal society. The crimes these two had committed were shown to far outweigh their partners’ rapes, abductions and murders, for they included offences against motherhood, ‘good’ womanhood, and wifehood. Their very femininity made them problematic. Karla Homolka, for example, was presented as nothing but a façade, beautiful but vacuous, appearing the epitome of femininity with her neat suits and long hair, yet revealing ‘traditionally masculine’ traits in her clear enjoyment of the rapes she performed on endless sex videotapes (Campbell, 2.9.95). Indeed, she seemed to deliberately pervert classically feminine values, like nurturance and care, as she described how she anaesthetized some of her victims with a cloth doused in Halothane, and then watched over them like a nurse while her male partner raped them (Paul Kenneth Bernardo v Queen, 1.5.95). As an older woman,

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Valmae Beck, on the other hand, was castigated for her looks, portrayed as ‘frumpy’, ‘plain’, ‘plumpish’ and ‘pug-faced’, and for her personality, described as ‘violent’, ‘tough’, ‘cunning’, ‘mean’, ‘insanely jealous’ and ‘unaffected [by court proceedings]’. Karla Homolka was persistently condemned for her lack of sisterly qualities. First, she had, by her own admission, offered her sister to her partner to rape as a Christmas gift, and had then aided him in the rapes and murders of other teenage girls. On the so-called ‘fireside chat’ video made after Tammy’s death, she offered to help her partner find and abduct young virgins, even as she was dressed in her dead sister’s clothes and engaging in sex with the girl’s killer on her bed. Unsurprisingly, such revelations led to Bernardo’s defence counsel, John Rosen, describing her as a ‘Venus fly trap’ who lured young women for assault and rape (Pron, et al. 8.7.95; Paul Kenneth Bernardo v Queen, 1.5.95). Rosen’s allegation neatly places the blame for the entrapment of these young women firmly on Homolka’s shoulders, rather than on those of Bernardo who, it is implied, would not have raped them, had Homolka not provided them so conveniently for that purpose. This attitude is confirmed by a commentator on the trial, Christie Blatchford, who avers that although both Bernardo and Homolka attacked the girls, ‘the betrayal … was Homolka’s’, and this was made worse by her gender, as ‘what gives both deeds ringing cruelty is the fact that Homolka is a woman’ (8.7.95). Indeed, understanding Karla as a woman was impossible according to another commentator, psychologist Nancy Lands, who insisted that women found it impossible to ‘deal with’ Karla Homolka because: ‘Women aren’t supposed to do these things’ (Mandel, 2.7.95). Specifically, as John Duncanson and Jim Rankin put it, ‘women just couldn’t get past the fact she could serve up her own sister … to the sexual cravings of a psychopath’ (3.9.95). Even more worrying, however, were Homolka’s admissions to the police that she knew if she ever had children with Paul, the girls would become his sex slaves and any male fetuses would be aborted. Despite this, she still desired to have his children, writing to a friend shortly after Kristen French’s murder that she would get pregnant as soon as Paul finished the rap album he was writing (Cairns and Burnside, 1.9.95b) She is painted here as a remorseless and detached woman obsessed with ‘pleasing her man’, and lacking even the most basic feminine quality of protection of one’s young. Needless to say, Karla quickly became an enigma for the media, the girl the court artists couldn’t draw (Duncanson and Rankin, 3.9.95); the girl the psychiatrists couldn’t pin down to a diagnosis, a list of symptoms (Duncanson and Rankin, 3.9.95); the girl who blithely crossed every boundary in the pursuit of her pleasure and that of her lover. In the words of one of her psychiatrists, Dr Angus MacDonald, she was a diagnostic conundrum, as ‘[d]espite her ability to present herself very well, there is a moral vacuity in her which is difficult, if not impossible, to explain’ (cited in Duncanson and Rankin, 3.9.95). Karla was a ‘true mystery, both physi-

Beyond villainy 147 cally and psychologically’ (Duncanson and Rankin, 3.9.95), who left her secure, happy childhood behind and ‘went willingly’ into Paul’s world of rape, murder, dismemberment and sadomasochistic sex (Rankin, et al. 2.9.95). Karla emerges here as a ‘femme fatale’, familiar from noir thrillers. For she, like them, is made a mystery: a strangely cold, incomprehensible sexual object whose looks seem somehow both to sum her up as vacant and shallow, and to render her all the more problematic. Her blonde prettiness is used both to explain the ease with which she ensnared her victims, and also to belie and make tragic her involvement in such sordidness in the first place. As a femme fatale, she represents ‘an inhuman partner … with whom no relationship is possible, an apathetic void imposing senseless, arbitrary ordeals’, not on the hard-boiled hero in this instance, but on her own society, which must attempt and, through their own adherence to rigid stereotypes, fail to understand her (Žižek, 1999: 162). Once again, the humanity of the woman who kills is rejected in favour of a depiction of mythical capriciousness. Valmae Beck, meanwhile, was portrayed as a poor mother who had left her six children, although most were fully grown, and ‘run off’ to indulge in a ‘life of crime’ with her new lover. The very fact of her motherhood made her participation in the rape and murder of Sian Kingi incomprehensible and condemnable. Her trial judge, for example, after describing her as a ‘callous, depraved woman’, could not refrain from remarking that: ‘ “No decent person could not feel revulsion at what you did – and you, a woman with children of your own” ’ (R v Valmae Beck, 19.10.88). Beck’s motherhood is hereby put on trial in the same way as was Karla Homolka’s womanhood: her own mothering must by definition be suspect, if she could indulge in the rape and murder of a child of a similar age to her own offspring. Valmae Beck represented as great an enigma for the mainstream law and media as did Karla Homolka. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the column ‘Kavanagh on Saturday’, which appeared the day after Watts’ sentencing: Before this case, could anyone have believed that a middle-aged mother would be party to such a crime as the Kingi murder? … what I would like to know is this: If such a plain, ordinary-looking housewife and mother as this one can become physically involved in such a terrifying crime, then how many more ordinary men and women are out there waiting to come under the influence, as she said she was, of an evil swine like her partner in rape, torture and murder? Surely any mother would have enough compassion to be repulsed and in quick succession sickeningly enlightened when her husband said he wanted to rape a 12year-old school-girl? By emphasising the wife, I have no intention of diminishing the responsibility of this weed, this germ of a husband. But with him, a male, with apologies to the rest of us, well, we’ve come to expect that sort of crime in recent years where such heroes lay in wait in

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Kavanagh’s denunciation of Beck and Watts is also representative of the mainstream media’s divergent responses to the male and female protagonists of this case. Unlike the incomprehension and horror which greeted Valmae Beck, Barrie Watts was instead subject to belittlement and ridicule as a ‘weed’ and a ‘germ’. However, he remained a man, even if lacking in masculine size and fortitude. For Kavanagh, in his suggestion of the sheer frequency of assaults such as that performed by Watts, nevertheless places men’s commission of rape, violence and murder on the continuum of male behaviour, albeit at the end comprising its worst excesses. Despite his predations, Paul Bernardo too was considered a regular guy, at least in the minds of some. His defence counsel, for example, told reporters that his client was ‘just like the rest of us’, adding that ‘he may have his problems, but who doesn’t?’ (cited in Cairns and Burnside, 1.9.95d). Even the redoubtable Christie Blatchford agreed, opining in her column, titled incidentally ‘Icy Bernardo chills soul’, that he ‘is one of us, a perfectly logical product of the modern age … self absorbed … needy … demanding of immediate gratification’ (16.8.95). His indictment for twenty-eight rapes, performed during the early years of his relationship with Homolka, and his acknowledged sexual sadism in the rapes and murders of Tammy Homolka, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, were not sufficient to dislodge his claim to humanity. As journalist, Judy Steed, wrote, Paul ‘is not a freak from outerspace … [but] a product of this culture, conditioned in the shadowy underworld of porn … whose behaviour escalated from using it to doing it’ (2.9.95). Bernardo was merely a classic hedonist, with his pleasure being his only ‘raison d’être and … guiding principle’ (Blatchford, 19.8.95). He, unlike Homolka, was not impossible to understand, for ‘his sociopathic behaviour practically leapt out like a check list from the pages of psychiatric manuals’ (Duncanson and Rankin, 3.9.95). Bernardo avoided the ridicule afforded to Barrie Watts due primarily to his looks – he was consistently described as handsome – and to his education – he had trained as an accountant. Although he had clearly battered his wife just before she left him, there was some doubt as to whether he was really a regular wife beater. Karla’s family, for example, failed to notice any of her injuries until the final few months of their relationship; and family doctors supported this allegation. The couple were, for the most part, considered by friends and family to have been loving and happy together until mid-1992. Paul was viewed as rather dominant and controlling of his wife in public, but she didn’t appear to take offence at this. Even Karla herself admitted that Paul’s control of her, at least early on in their relationship, didn’t worry her, as the things he asked of her were not terribly important to her and he reciprocated in kind (Paul Kenneth Bernardo v Queen, 1.5.95). Indeed, Karla,

Beyond villainy 149 in the words of Toronto Star journalists, appeared ‘made to order for Bernardo … everything he wanted in a woman: good looking, great body … someone he could control, dominate, and use as a sexual playtoy – and later enlist as a partner in his crimes’ (Rankin et al. 2.9.95). Bernardo, then, was not entirely responsible for his acts as a sexual sadist; he was rather part of a team. Like Ian Brady, of Moors Murders fame, before him, Paul Bernardo needed Karla Homolka to graduate the final step from rape to murder (Campbell, 2.9.95; Makin, 2.9.95a). Theirs was a ‘spiraling involvement’ which really took off after the accidental death of Tammy (Pearson, cited in Campbell, 2.9.95), ultimately creating ‘an awe-inspiring terror-and-rape machine, their blond good looks and toothy charm a ghastly contrast to the utter lack of mercy which, together and separately, they displayed to their captives’ (Blatchford, 23.8.95). Even Paul’s eventual beating of Karla was explained using the team mentality: he bashed her, so journalists speculated, because she was panicked by the thought of arrest and he lost patience with her, considering her more of a liability than an ally (Rankin et al. 2.9.95). Paul Bernardo was not vilified to anywhere near the extent of Barrie Watts. At the conclusion of his trial he was presented not as evil, but sick; not as abnormal, but so normal that psychiatrists apparently had no trouble labelling him with the understated diagnosis of an antisocial personality disorder (Rankin et al. 2.9.95), even though they considered his sexual sadism to be so extreme that he had membership in a group ‘populated by only 30 of 1000 killers analyzed by the FBI’ (Makin, 2.9.95a). So common were Bernardo’s peccadilloes that they invoked a number of regular descriptive terms, such as paraphilia, sexual sadism, voyeurism, hebephilia, urophilia, coprophilia and narcissism (Rankin et al. 2.9.95). Bernardo, it seems, was a perfect candidate for psychiatric investigation, a psychiatrist’s dream. In comparison with Bernardo, Barrie Watts received little media interest. Instead, the bulk of the media attention went to his far more voluble associate, Valmae Beck, whose evidence filled the pages of the newspapers covering the case from the start of her trial in 1988 to the conclusion of his two years later. Beck’s presentation of her partner as a victim of his own lust was similar in most respects to the mainstream legal and media portrayal of Paul Bernardo. Both men also shared the same, avowedly uncontrollable desire to have sex with nubile virgins. Beck insisted throughout her trial testimony and her police interview that Watts had repeatedly declared that only raping a virgin ‘for the first and the last time’ would help rid him of ‘the aggression in his body’ (R v Valmae Beck, 19.10.88; R v Barrie Watts, 29.1.90). The media reiterated Beck’s portrayal of Watts as a sexual obsessive throughout the case,20 citing similar characteristics to those of Paul Bernardo in support, including his alleged ‘bent for pornographic videos’ (McGregor, 10.2.90; 11.2.90) and extremely high sex drive (cited in R v Valmae Beck, 19.10.88). Watts’ lack of remorse for his crime, and his alleged

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desire to repeat it, made him unpopular with the press, who ultimately cheered his sentence of life imprisonment as the just desserts of an evil man. Nevertheless, he, like Paul Bernardo, remained comprehensible, even if distasteful, in a way that their wives were not. Mainstream legal and media portrayals of Paul Bernardo and Barrie Watts serve, then, to naturalize their crimes. Their violent acts are considered to form part of a spectrum of male behaviour, ranging from gentleness to occasional outbursts of violence and sadism. Violent female criminals, on the other hand, are not only considered more ferocious and fearsome than their male counterparts, but are also guilty of the sin of hubris in their assumption of the traditionally male preserve of action, especially murderous action. Karla Homolka’s and Valmae Beck’s alleged sadism, however, made them even more dangerous than other female murderers, bringing them not only increased vilification, but creating an even more desperate need for resolution than is usual in cases where women kill. Ultimately, mainstream legal and media discourses recuperated Karla Homolka’s and Valmae Beck’s troublesome narratives of sadism and cruelty through unconscious recourse to Freud. Following the stock story of Freud’s interpretation of the female beating fantasy, these discourses ‘simply’ rewrote both dramas as tragedies of masochism. Luckily for the collective peace of mind, they were helped in their quest by none other than the two women themselves, who were both anxious to avoid further public hostility. Karla Homolka’s narrative of victimization and coercion was developed by none other than the prosecution counsel, Ray Houlahan, at her exhusband’s trial. He was helped in no small part in this endeavour by Karla herself, who, upon entering prison in 1993, became an avid reader of texts on the battered woman syndrome. Indeed, she even recommended Lenore Walker’s book The Battered Woman Syndrome (1984) to several of her friends and associates who were due to take the stand during the Bernardo trial (Cairns and Burnside, 2.8.95; Duncanson and Pron, 2.8.95; Makin, 2.8.95). She also managed to convince no fewer than three court-appointed psychiatrists that she had been regularly and severely beaten, although they were unable to agree on whether she had developed BWS (Paul Kenneth Bernardo v Queen, 1.5.95; Globe and Mail, 4.8.95; Makin, 12.8.95, 15.8.95). Even if she had, however, almost everyone from the prosecutor to the psychiatrists concurred that this couldn’t excuse her participation in the rape and murder of three young women (Paul Kenneth Bernardo v Queen, 1.5.95; Makin, 2.9.95a; Cairns and Burnside, 1.9.95c; Blatchford, 1.9.95). Ray Houlahan’s portrayal of Karla Homolka was always going to stretch the public’s concept of battering relationships. Her catalogue of the abuse she suffered and the control her partner exercised over her, which began with him choosing her friends and her hair colours, and ended with daily beatings and him forcing her to eat his faeces, was extreme but not impossible to imagine. Certainly, no-one denied she had been beaten very savagely just before she left Bernardo. However, Karla’s complete inability to take respon-

Beyond villainy 151 sibility for any of her actions during the entire five-year period of her relationship with Paul Bernardo was the sticking point for many watching proceedings. For Karla denied her agency for every act she undertook, ranging from the innocuous, such as her decision to send her partner hundreds of sexy cards and letters throughout this time, to the sinister, for example her theft from her workplace of the drugs necessary for the rapes of her sister and her sister’s friend, and her determination not to free Kristen French or to help Leslie Mahaffy when she had the chance. As trial commentator Rosie DiManno observed: ‘ “He told me to” … was her mantra, her robotic response to query after query lobbed by Crown attorney Ray Houlahan’ (20.6.95). Although heavily criticized in the media, this masochistic, non-agentic portrayal of Karla Homolka was eventually allowed to stand as the final word on her case. Accompanied by photos of her beaten face, the Toronto Sun, for instance, claimed in their last piece on the trial that Karla was under ‘the evil power of a sexual sadist’ who had gradually conditioned her to total dependence on him, so that she so needed ‘the affection and connection’ that she would ‘do anything to maintain it’ (Cairns and Burnside, 3.9.95). The Globe and Mail also summed up the case as that of a ‘combination of two complementary sexually deviant individuals with a more clearly dominant male and a compliant, masochistic female’ (Makin, 2.9.95a). Karla’s potentially troubling agency, accidentally evidenced in her virtuoso verbal jousting with Bernardo’s defence counsel, John Rosen, was subsumed under a flurry of articles stating that she was a passive, chameleon-like personality whose ‘future behaviour depends far more on whom she happens to meet than on anything within herself’ (Makin, 2.9.95a; Duncanson and Rankin, 3.9.95). She is presented here as truly a blank canvas, a tabula rasa waiting only to be written into being by her next lover. With a character analysis like this, it was hardly surprising that one of the letters to the editor commented wryly, ‘God help us if she falls in love again’ (Carruthers, 2.9.95). Valmae Beck’s sadistic beating-fantasy narrative was likewise reinterpreted in mainstream legal and media discourses as a tale of masochistic devotion. Accordingly, Beck’s defence counsel insisted she had ‘an abiding love of and loyalty to her husband’, which allowed him to make her do ‘something against her principles and from which she derived no pleasure’ (R v Valmae Beck, 19.10.88; Courier-Mail, 19.10.88). Although ‘unfortunate to have been married to Watts’, her defence counsel begged that the jury ‘not heap vilification upon [Beck] and say because she is married she is equally as responsible as him’ (R v Valmae Beck, 19.10.88; Courier-Mail, 19.10.88). According to the press, reasons for Beck’s involvement in the rape and murder of Sian Kingi lay not in her own sadistic desires, but rather in her insecurity and increasing age. The Sunday Mail summed up this argument concisely, declaring that ‘Beck’s age and frumpish looks made Watts dominant in the relationship. Over the years her will had gradually sunk,

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water-logged, into his until eventually she had wholly submitted. She was terrified of losing him, would do anything for him’ (McGregor, 11.2.90). Watts, according to the papers and Beck’s defence, had thus gained ‘total control’ of her (Budd and Rowett, 8.2.90). Yet masochism, paradoxically, is also viewed as powerful, as is demonstrated in the Sunday Mail piece, which concluded that ‘[Beck’s] acquiescence emboldened [Watts]’ (McGregor, 11.2.90). Without a submissive woman, as the argument also ran in Homolka’s case, a sadistic man would never act, but together the two may become a ‘lethal pair’. This conclusion goes some way towards revealing the complexity of such relationships, rather than merely reasserting the simple frame through which they are generally seen. Michelle Massé argues, for instance, that sadomasochistic partnerships inhabit a ‘mutual and deeply problematic’ relationship through which ‘both sadist and masochist define self and other’ (1992: 44). In her terms, these relationships blur the boundaries of activity and passivity, of agent and victim (Massé, 1992: 43–4). For both are vital to the continued existence of the other, and function together in mutual desire. Yet, partnerships like those of Homolka and Bernardo and Beck and Watts, need not be read as sadomasochistic dualities at all. Rather, they might be understood as the union of two sadists, driving each other on, searching for the same unfullfillable desire. For, as Marie Bonaparte states, like the vampires of the previous chapter, the sadist too demands the impossible: Born of the lover’s eternal but unattainable desire to unite with his beloved, this ambivalence craves the destruction of the subject in order that the vain, and thus painful, striving may end. Yet, though the great criminal sadist will at times partially devour his victim, true union with her is still withheld, as to all lovers. Then, only a destruction of that ephemeral plaything of his passion will establish a more enduring love which, for a time, assuages the sadist’s torturing, unappeasable desires. (1995: 447) To act in concert so effectively, as both these couples did, insists upon mutual need. For, other than following slavishly the wishes of the beloved, what are the pleasures for the masochist in aiding their partners to destroy young girls they, themselves, have also raped and violated? Could not the pleasure be more sadistic in origin, based on both partners’ desire to dominate, to violate and, finally, to possess utterly? Karla Homolka’s and Valmae Beck’s narrativization as masochists also omitted various important elements of their stories. To start with, any suggestion of the women’s enjoyment of their crimes was buried in most media reports and trial proceedings under an avalanche of protestations regarding their devotion to their male partners and their extreme emotional dependence upon them. None of these representations considered that women who team up with male sexual sadists might have issues of their own

Beyond villainy 153 to work out via sadistic behaviour. An FBI profile of such killers, for instance, observed that their female partners all ‘fell’ for them with remarkable swiftness. Yet, as Patricia Pearson comments, this interesting fact is not considered further by the researchers (1998: 185), although it could easily indicate that the women may have been interested in such men because they had similar desires. Nor is their eventual violence towards children and young girls seen in any other way than as coercion. The idea, as Pearson remarks, that ‘women can be strategically aggressive toward children, or that their violence isn’t always personal, private, or impulsive, that sometimes it is … a means … of furthering an ambition … a vehicle to her own empowerment’ (1998: 102) is never given the credence it deserves. Instead of viewing Homolka’s and Beck’s attitudes as responses to the ‘corrupting power of love’ (Pearson, 1998: 179), we could just as easily view them as predators who wanted to keep their male partners and were happy to oblige them in any way they wished as long as they stayed firmly at the centre of their sexual universes (Pearson, 1998: 192).21 This would not be devotion, but strategy, not coercion, but empowerment. It is one thing, however, to fail to mention a possibility, quite another to gloss over or remain silent regarding a conviction. Yet most of the reports on Valmae Beck failed to mention her conviction for rape, and the majority of the reports on Karla Homolka gave her videotaped sexual assaults very little attention. These omissions are interesting in the first instance because such convictions and visual images are relatively rare for women, which, given the media’s propensity for the unusual, should have ensured their inclusion in the narratives. In the second instance, Beck’s conviction unequivocally attests to the jurors’ belief that she was active in the sexual abuse of her victim, while, in Homolka’s case, her participation was incontrovertible given the copious videotaped footage. The media, however, stolidly adhered to their particular narrative frame, choosing rarely and briefly to note, but never to discuss, such inconvenient developments. This stance was not merely a result of ‘pack journalism’; rather, the presentation of the two female protagonists in these cases reflects hegemonic heteropatriarchal conceptions of femininity. For reports downplaying the importance of Karla Homolka’s and Valmae Beck’s commission of rape render overt the banality of male violence towards women, while hiding female abusiveness. Apparently, so these news stories say, men rape and murder, women watch and help with the clean up. Nevertheless, the cases of Homolka and Beck persistently overstepped the media’s masochistic narrative frame. To begin with, Karla’s unthreatening prettiness and Valmae’s maternity lent their crimes an intensely menacing aspect. Karla’s involvement in the abduction of Kristen French, for instance, was made all the more monstrous because, due to the way she looked, Kristen came over to the car willingly when Karla called her asking for bogus directions. Her ‘innocent’ face was also instrumental in procuring Tammy and her friend for drugging and rape. She was, thus, a most

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dangerous Lady Macbeth-type character in these portrayals. Kavanagh’s comments on Valmae Beck, on the other hand, attest that mothers who commit rapes and murders are seen to embody the ‘monstrous maternal’ in all her fearsomeness: metaphorically and literally Beck was a mother who turned against her own (‘Kavanagh on Saturday’, 10.2.90).22 Due to the frisson of female enjoyment in these sex crimes, these two cases also constituted yet a further potential abomination to their obvious contravention of the stereotypes of good woman and mother. Their evocation of lesbianism aligns them with sexual deviancy in dominant heteropatriarchal discourses.23 Rather than taking the opportunity to engage in the familiar derogation of lesbians, however, in the cases of Homolka and Beck the media sidestepped the issue altogether. The sheer pervasiveness of lesbianism’s traditional association with violence (Hart, 1994: x) makes this neglect worthy of comment. Why were neither Homolka nor Beck presented as ‘demonic corrupters’ (Shaktini, 1990: 29) when both committed rape? The answer to this puzzle lies in Homolka’s and Beck’s perceived heterosexuality. As both were inscribed in the heteropatriarchal system via their relationships with men, their desire, in any sense of the word, was rendered invisible, subsumed under that of their male partners. This erasure of female desire is not merely a result of Homolka’s and Beck’s portrayal as obsessively fulfilling the needs of their men. Rather, as Lynda Hart reminds us, this is the way the economy of desire operates, focused around male desire either heterosexual or homosexual (1994: x). Freud, for example, insisted that boys alone developed active desires such as scopophilia and epistemophilia, while girls relinquished these in favour of exhibitionism and narcissism. Hence, boys were granted the gaze, while girls fulfilled the function of the ‘to be looked at’, the object of the gaze. Boys, thus, learned to desire the other, according to Freud’s analysis, while girls learned only to desire themselves as objects for male eyes, submerging their own active desire in order to become the passive desired. Hart cites Teresa de Lauretis’ neat summing up of this situation: ‘One may be born a woman or a man, but one can only desire as a man’ (Hart, 1994: x). Male desire, however, as Luce Irigaray has observed, is ultimately selfdirected as well, leading only to ‘the blind spot of that old dream of symmetry’ (1985a: 11). In other words, male narcissism creates a desire for the self same that involves an inevitably violent incorporation of the desired other (Hart, 1994: 18). Male desire for the other is only a narcissistic fantasy of what Hart denotes The Woman (1994: 21). Although The Woman forms the site of male desire, this desire has nothing to do with active epistemophilia, a desire to know the otherness of women, but remains locked in narcissism and desire for a male fantasy of woman who is naught but a reflection of man himself. Women as desiring subjects are therefore erased in this economy, which is premised only on male desire for the same (Hart, 1994: 21). Lesbianism, in placing itself outside this economy, unsettles its terms by bespeaking the possibility of female desire. Historically, this threat has been

Beyond villainy 155 resolved through insisting that lesbians are ‘not women’: if desire is intrinsically masculine, so the argument goes, then lesbians are merely desiring males in female bodies, or inverts, as early sexologists dubbed them. Desire between women, then, was not only ‘repressed, but foreclosed’, deemed impossible (Hart, 1994: 15). Yet, as Hart acknowledges, that which is outlawed does not simply disappear; the ‘return of the repressed’, to borrow Freud’s famous phrase, is ever likely (Hart, 1994: 15). Lesbianism therefore continues to destabilize the heteropatriarchal system, which has been built on demands for female passivity and objectification, through its constant attestation to the existence of an active female desire, to the moment when the ‘looked at’ finally looks back. Karla Homolka’s and Valmae Beck’s sexual abuse of their young female victims conflicted dramatically with their representation as obsessively male-identified women and was thus ignored in mainstream media depictions. This rigorous suppression of their cruelty to and hatred for other women functions primarily to negate female violence and female desire, while reinforcing the autonomy of male desire and the prosaic nature of male violence. Even the temptation of an ever popular portrayal of the ‘evil lesbian’24 was not sufficient to tempt the press from their established narrative frame of masochistic passivity. Portrayals of Homolka and Beck casting them as having killed ‘for love’, to please their male partners, explicitly insisted upon their lack of responsibility for their crimes. Like many of the women in Hilary Allen’s study of female offenders, they were depicted as never having engaged in an intentional act in their lives. The only desire they were presented as possessing was that of attending to the needs of men; any more active desire fulfilling their own wants was disallowed them.25 Once again, then, the mass media audience was prevented and protected from having to countenance the possibility, indeed the reality, of female violence and female sadism.

Feminist silences The main impediment to a feminist consideration of the cases of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck proceeds, as does the malestream vilification, from the unpalatable suggestion that the two may have enjoyed their crimes. The distaste, however, springs from different sources. Transgressions of the stereotypes of good wife and mother are rarely problematic in feminist legal or cultural studies theory. However, Homolka’s invocation of the femme fatale and Beck’s of the monstrous maternal, particularly when aligned with the suggestion of enjoyment, constitute a very real barrier to feminist consideration. Although feminist theorists, as noted in Chapter 1, have reclaimed the myth of the malevolent woman/mother, represented by figures such as Kali and Medea, it seems that ‘real life’ examples of the femme fatale or the monstrous maternal are not celebrated in the same way.26 This exclusion may relate to our psychological make-up: early dependence on mother

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figures makes us especially vulnerable to the fear a truly bad woman/mother in human form can elicit. For feminist legal theorists and cultural studies analysts, however, political exigencies appear more likely to form the prime barrier to discussions of women like Homolka and Beck: it is harder to defend a person who has apparently willingly committed heinous acts of cruelty than one whose actions resulted from duress or oppression. Women who desire to do more than merely watch ‘a child being beaten’ are not just castigated, it seems, but repressed out of conscious existence. In feminist theory this suppression has a lot to do with the original aims of the movement and the constraining/enabling power of identity politics. One of the main aims of both first and second wave feminism was to expose and challenge female oppression within heteropatriarchal societies. This project was and is still necessarily broad and theoretically expansive, ranging from radical campaigns to gain equal legal, educational, economic and reproductive rights for women to theoretical analyses of the representation of women in numerous discourses, such as those pertaining to the media, the law, medicine and history.27 In Chapter 2 I discussed how the necessity to claim an identity on which to found feminist politics produced particular feminist constructions of Woman. The two most important and enduring of these are the victimized woman and the nurturing woman. These two constructs worked so effectively because they suited the aims of the general movement, and indeed in many ways they still do. The victimized woman embodied the damage patriarchal oppression had inflicted upon women, and the nurturing woman demonstrated that women possessed knowledges and modes of behaviour which, although developed as a response to oppression, nevertheless differed markedly from, and were considered preferable to, those privileged under patriarchy. Crucially for this study, however, neither of these constructions of Woman acknowledges feminine potential for violence or sadism. This means, then, that the actions of women like Homolka and Beck are effectively excluded from feminist representation because, unlike the cases of the battered women, or even Tracey Wigginton, their actions cannot be read as examples where women overthrew their oppression and retaliated against either their specific abusers or a general representative of them. Instead, Homolka and Beck appear to have learnt the most abhorrent practices of the patriarchs and used them against their own sex. Furthermore, their media portrayals as the willing slaves of men, desperate to fulfil their husbands’ every whim, are likely to be read in some feminist discourses as examples of ‘antifeminism’ (Dworkin, 1983: 195), where women’s upholding of the injunctions of heteropatriarchal stereotypical good wife- and motherhood is considered inimical to a feminist dismantling of these very structures.28 Politically, then, it is relatively easy to determine the reasons for feminist legal and cultural studies theorists’ silence regarding the cases of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck, as neither of these cases would seem very useful in advancing the cause of female equality and freedom from oppression.

Beyond villainy 157 Nevertheless, as has been demonstrated so far in this chapter, representations of women like these have much to tell about the mainstream law and media’s negation of female desire, violence and agency. These cases, then, should have relevance for feminist projects relating to the representation of women in the media, for the legal portrayal and sentencing of female criminals, even for philosophical analyses of female agency and subjectivity. It would seem, therefore, that feminist theorists ignore these cases due to their own squeamishness or abhorrence rather than to the cases’ intrinsic lack of interest or importance. Gender performatives and discursive clashes Further reasons for the persistent exclusion of cases like those of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck from a feminist construction of violent female subjectivity lie in their unsettling of pretheorized notions of femininity. For Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck failed to perform their gender correctly. In other words, their actions did not reiterate feminine norms as they are articulated within traditional legal and media discourses or within feminist legal discourses. Moreover, their transgression rendered overt the constructedness of the expectations and assumptions constituting these very different performatives of femininity. Homolka’s and Beck’s subversion of mainstream performatives of femininity was made evident early in their cases, even before their arrests. For the dominant media assumed that the search for the killer of the two girls in St. Catherines and of Sian Kingi in Noosa would end with the capture of a man. The Toronto Sun, for instance, reproduced an identikit image of a male suspect with the words ‘Have You Seen This Man?’ (Mandel, 18.2.93), and a television special on Kristen French’s abduction claimed that police were looking for two men (Burnside and Cairns, 1995: 465). Sian Kingi’s killer was also referred to as ‘he’ in reports immediately after her body was located, with her father and other Noosa residents opining that ‘the man responsible for Sian’s death should be bashed to death’ as ‘he’s an animal’ (Franklin, 5.12.87; Hansen, 6.12.87; McDonald, 9.12.87). Investigating police later confirmed their own initial disbelief that ‘a woman was involved in such a heinous crime’ (Budd and Rowett, 8.2.90). Likewise, Karla Homolka’s arrest was initially greeted with great surprise in the press. Several people who knew her expressed their belief that she was merely a further victim of Paul Bernardo’s, and that she was not ‘capable of being involved in a homicide’ (Rankin, 22.2.93). Clearly, then, dominant media performatives of femininity do not include a propensity for women to act as ‘psychotic killers’ (Barrass, 9.11.86); this role is instead reserved solely for men. Once Karla Homolka had been convicted and Valmae Beck arrested, however, their subversion of media and legal performatives of femininity was made explicit, as not only were they witnesses to such ‘masculine’ crimes, but they were also found to have been be willing participants and punished

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accordingly. These two cases, then, revolved around mainstream legal and media discourses’ efforts to contain representation of the transgressive women at their centre within the stereotypes of willing slave and masochistic victim. Karla Homolka’s and Valmae Beck’s confessed participation, however, continually subverted and challenged their probable enactment of these more understandable gender performatives. For when the ‘script’ called for complete submission to the demands of their male partners, Homolka and Beck provided evidence of their own desire; when only their spectatorship was required, they gave allegations of their own abusiveness; when remorse was expected, they shed no tears; and, finally, when their partners’ sadism, autonomy and sole responsibility for the crimes were demanded, they insisted the rapes and murders would and could never have taken place without them. The two main ‘types’ of female criminals acceptable in feminist legal theory at present, namely the victim and the avenger, make the requirements of feminist performatives explicit. Female autonomy, independence, solidarity with other women and protection of children are all valued in feminist female gender performatives, and women’s oppression and victimization by men are given sympathy and understanding. Women who act as Beck and Homolka did, and who claim devotion to their male partners, seeing other women only as the tools of male lust, clearly do not demonstrate many of these characteristics. Their autonomy is suspect as they acted in concert with, and perhaps under the jurisdiction of, men; their independence is also debatable as they constantly professed their need to retain their partners’ love; their solidarity with other women and their protection of children is evidently non-existent; and their victimization and oppression by men are also doubtful as, while they insisted they were coerced, their own narratives and video footage tell a different story. Unlike Mrs R., Pamela Sainsbury and Erika Kontinnen, who killed to protect both themselves and their children from further abuse, and even Tracey Wigginton, who may have enacted a revenge fantasy upon the body of a male victim unknown to her, Karla Homolka’s and Valmae Beck’s tales of sadistic pleasures and murderous desires executed upon the bodies of young girls appear incapable of feminist presentation. Their actions’ lack of fit within feminist female gender performatives is seemingly too encompassing to produce anything other than the silence which they have so far received from this quarter. The transgressive character of Homolka’s and Beck’s femininity in both feminist and mainstream legal and media discourses is largely a symptom of a discursive clash. For although many aspects of their personal narratives are apparently unrepresentable in these discourses, the women’s performance of femininity as willing slave and older dominatrix of younger women29 is quite well established within the fictional discourse of pornography.30 The problem lies, however, in Homolka’s and Beck’s insertion of their ‘real’ activities into this already extant fictional role. In acting out such pornographic fantasies (or nightmares), Homolka and Beck force into the open the

Beyond villainy 159 real ramifications of this kind of imagining. They demonstrate the availability of such a role for women and the ease with which women in ‘real life’ situations can assume it. Nor are they the only women to do so. Indeed, this role is particularly popular with women who kill and sexually assault in partnership with men. Myra Hindley, for instance, also inserted herself into this role, as did Martha Beck, one of the couple denoted the Honeymoon Killers, and Rose West. Their usage of pornographic discourses did not end with these self-representations; most of these couples also chose to produce some actual pornography of their own. Brady and Hindley made audio tapes and pornographic photographs of some of their victims; the Wests took photographs and video- and audiotapes; and Homolka and Bernardo, of course, made videotapes. Valmae Beck can likewise be considered a producer of pornography through her lengthy confession. Although pornography is thus clearly implicated in the activities of these kinds of murderers, this does not mean that it was directly responsible for them. Rather, pornographic discourses provided convenient scripts in which these couples situated and articulated their desires. Pornography provided particular representations which shaped the form and content of their rapes and killings and, hence, the way they came to understand them (Cameron and Fraser, 1987: xiii). For, as Patricia Pearson observes, ‘whatever the accessible cultural rationale is, we will borrow it to explain ourselves’ (1998: 40). Pornographic representations both help construct desire in the first place and make available particular pleasures to those who engage in the activities, or who merely watch the fruits of such labours later on television, or in the newspapers or courtrooms. Certainly, the Bernardo/Homolka case attracted audiences because, as the Globe and Mail commented, it provided ‘stock fantasies – sex with schoolgirls, sex involving a threesome, sex with an unwilling partner … that have tempted us for decades’ (Harvey, 7.8.95). Bernardo’s trial was partially ‘a trial about pornography’ with the defendant depicted as a ‘stock character’ who got off on the standard fare of sexual sadists – dog collars, death threats, ropes, handcuffs, pain, domination (Steed, 2.9.95). The Beck/Watts case involved substantially the same ingredients and, needless to say, also evoked the same public fascination. Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck enacted gender performatives, then, emanating from pornography, eschewing the more acceptable and defensible scripts promulgated within either mainstream or feminist legal and media discourses.31 This is not to suggest that they shuffled consciously between discourses as fully formed selves to find the performative best suited to their activities. Gender performatives are not roles ‘which … express or disguise an interior “self”’ so much as acts ‘which construct the social fiction of [their] own psychological interiority’ (Butler, 1990c: 279). In enacting these pornographic gender performatives, then, Homolka and Beck constituted themselves as female sadists; they learnt to ‘feel’ and to ‘be’ willing slaves and dominatrices by learning to act as them. The particular corporeal acts required by particular gender performatives thus reproduce the script while

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allowing for individual interpretations of any enactment. So, to use Butler’s terms, their acts were expressive of and conformed to a particular gender identity while contesting the expectations of other gender identities (Butler, 1990c: 278). Feminist incorporation of Karla Homolka’s and Valmae Beck’s enactment of the pornographic performatives of willing slave and dominatrix is problematic for reasons other than these scripts’ conflict with acceptable feminist performatives. For the discourse of pornography itself has often been considered antithetical to feminism’s general aims and values. The feminist critique of pornography instituted in the early 1980s by theorists like Andrea Dworkin, Susan Griffin and Catherine MacKinnon, although subject to challenge in more recent feminist theory, is nevertheless still cited in contemporary debates. In brief, this position holds that pornography evidences the innate aggression of male psyches and men’s hatred of women. Pornographic representations objectify women and women’s experiences of objectification are the true core of their oppression. Furthermore, these theorists argue that there is a direct relationship between the existence and consumption of pornography and male violence towards women because pornography is used by men to celebrate and inculcate male power. Robin Morgan’s popular catch cry ‘Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice’ seems to sum up the general impetus of this sort of theory. Later feminist theorists, like Jessica Benjamin, have criticized these arguments for their collapse of fantasy with reality. Benjamin contends that pornographic fantasy is very different from the violent, non-consensual practice which Dworkin et al. insist is pornography’s only definition. The fantasy of erotic domination, for instance, is common to both men and women, which means, Benjamin avers, that not all pornography is rooted in patriarchal oppression of women (1984: 292–311). Ann Barr Snitow has proposed an alternative understanding of pornography which broadens its parameters beyond the misogynist scenarios envisaged by Dworkin. She suggests that there are many types of pornography, ranging from the instructive to the pleasurable, from heterosexual to homosexual, and that context tends to dictate the meanings any pornographic representation acquires (Snitow, 1984: 258–75). Regardless of these critiques, however, Dworkin et al.’s theorization of pornography remains influential, as in popular debates, at least, the notion that pornography somehow ‘causes’ violent crime against women is very powerful and still widely accepted.32 Karla Homolka’s and Valmae Beck’s narratives of sexual sadism are thus allowable within the discourses of pornography and unacceptable within feminist theory. For even the most broad-minded feminist analyses of pornography, like Benjamin’s, rarely consider the slip from masochist to sadist, inherent in the beating fantasy, which is narrated so well in Beck’s and Homolka’s tales.33 Instead, women like Beck and Homolka who make violent pornography using non-consenting participants are left to inhabit

Beyond villainy 161 the unlivable body, or perhaps the unthinkable body, of feminist legal and cultural theory. Feminist legal theory’s construction of the violent female subject is therefore as partial and delimited as those produced by mainstream legal and media discourses, and as incapable of encompassing women who exhibit certain desires and perversities. Mimetic identifications The very excessiveness of Homolka’s and Beck’s transgressions raises the possibility of an alternative reading of their cases based around Luce Irigaray’s ideas on mimesis. Through its deliberate and subversive assumption of the feminine role in discourse, mimesis aims to thwart the continued subordination of women. Irigaray, in her usage of this technique to reveal and speak the often silenced feminine, explains its political purpose in her essay ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’: [Women] must, through repetition – interpretation of the way in which the feminine finds itself determined in discourse – as lack, default, or as mime and inverted reproduction of the subject – show that on the feminine side it is possible to exceed and disturb this logic. (1985b: 75–6) Lynda Hart, citing Elin Diamond, asserts that Irigaray posits two sorts of mimesis that exist simultaneously. The first, ‘patriarchal mimesis’, involves mere copying of the patriarchal ideal. The second, ‘mimesis–mimicry’, subverts the first in its excessive production of ‘fake offspring’ which threatens patriarchal order via simulacra that may look like the original but which, through their multiplicity, reveal a semblance indicative only of the non-existence, the lack of authority of that original (Hart, 1998: 85–6). Through ‘playful repetition’, then, mimesis might become a strategy that has the potential to reveal the construction of Woman by illuminating that which is supposed to remain invisible (Bell, 1999a: 139). According to legal philosopher Drucilla Cornell, mimesis is vital in any resignification of the term ‘Woman’, because it represents the ‘speech of the object’ and demands a ‘relinquishment of the rigid subject/object divide, a relinquishment of the feminine position in which the feminine is only defined as object within the masculine symbolic’ (1991: 148). The dangerous implications of the psychical fantasy of Woman,34 which have led to the present ‘dearth of symbolizations of the feminine within sexual difference’ and, in turn, to the silencing of many women, mean that resymbolization is of vital importance (Cornell, 1995: 77). In Cornell’s analysis, this kind of identification creates a space for women to resignify the feminine through subversion of the currently entrenched system of gender representation. Rosi Braidotti agrees, arguing that Irigarayan mimesis is ‘highly effective, in that it allows women to revisit and repossess the discursive and material sites

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where “woman” was essentialized, disqualified, or quite simply excluded’ (1994: 200). Although Homolka and Beck heretofore appear representative only of the horror of a femininity so perverted as to turn against itself, they can also be interpreted as mimetically identified with the stereotypical role of the good wife. In pushing to their extreme limits the demands of passivity and selflessness typically made of women in heterosexual ideologies of love and romance, and especially in the role of good wife, Homolka and Beck subvert such fantasies and turn them inside out. Good wife becomes monster, subservient lover becomes killer, as these two mutate and mangle traditional stereotypes of marriage and partnership. The extreme passivity these roles demand is transformed into passive aggression, as Homolka’s and Beck’s enactment demonstrates that lack of action in the end becomes a form of acting, and that spectators are never just neutral observers. They may not resignify the term ‘woman’ in a way appealing to feminist theory, but they do make overt the monstrous limits of comforting heteropatriarchal allegories of obedient, loyal and accommodating wives. In this sense, then, they have behaved mimetically, enacting this stereotype of wife so effectively that their performance becomes both criminal and terrifying. Reading these cases as examples of mimetic over-identification allows them at least some feminist consideration, though not recuperation as occurred in mainstream rewritings, which attempted to return Homolka and Beck to their ‘proper’ feminine place and thereby restore order to the world. Rather, these women can be viewed as subversive of heteropatriarchal ideologies, yet not condoned in their cruelty and brutality. Instead of approaching them as cause célèbres, similar to cases involving battered women, or as compelling revenge fantasies, in the same manner as women like Tracey Wigginton, the cases of Homolka and Beck can be interpreted as the destructive flipside of heteropatriarchal ideals of the feminine. This mimetic reading of Homolka’s and Beck’s performance of conventional roles also shows that agency is a product of the discursive regime which portrays it. In other words, the narratives told determine whether agentic representation is possible. Traditional stories of good wives and mothers generally reduce this possibility, so as to emphasize feminine passivity. Mimetic tales, however, such as this alternative reading of Homolka and Beck, stress female agency by presenting over-identification as a deliberate subversive tactic.35 This interpretation does not diminish the women’s agency or culpability, rather it shatters the myths through which these women are represented. The full horror of their acts is therefore preserved not hidden, analysed not ignored. Indeed, such analysis in effect forces recognition of the ‘ruse of reality’, as Lynda Hart puts it, where the Real is excluded in favour of the production and maintenance of culturally and socially acceptable ‘reality’ (1998: 203). The experience of female sadists

Beyond villainy 163 is thus granted a moment, a place, an identity within ‘reality’ which then allows female sadism to exist at all.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated how the cases of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck offer the least possibility for recuperation in either mainstream or feminist legal and media discourses. Although mainstream discourses have attempted partial recuperation, their efforts to effect narrative closure remain incomplete. Feminist discourses, on the other hand, have been silent, apparently preferring to ignore such cases altogether. For this reason, cases such as those of Homolka and Beck operate as the ‘limit’ cases for feminist female gender performatives, and serve as good tests for the paradigmatic subject models on which feminist legal theory is premised. These models of subjectivity are necessary because they allow the discourse to speak generally about women’s representation and treatment within traditional legal discourse. Nevertheless, the silence surrounding these cases shows that these narratives and performatives of subjectivity do not necessarily allow for even an acknowledgement of certain violent women who radically transgress their parameters. Feminists’ failure to publicly recognize the agency of women involved in truly heinous crimes, and their disregard of the mainstream law and media’s vilificatory portrayals and later recuperations, deny the ramifications such representations have for all women. Women like Homolka and Beck provide strong exemplification of the disjunctures of gender performance between and within discourses. They expose the complex nexus of norms, expectations, assumptions and constraints operating within the performance of femininity as constructed by feminist discourses, and they reveal the exclusions through which the acceptable violent female subject of feminist legal theory is constituted. Cases like those of Homolka and Beck offer a challenge to consider the operation and effects of those exclusions. Yet they also make it imperative that recognition and acknowledgement of the agency of the women involved in these crimes be divorced from any kind of implicit condonation of their cruelty. The complexities of desire and agency operating in the cases of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck need means of feminist expression. As Lee Fitzroy has stated, we need to question and to challenge homogeneous aggressive masculinity and passive femininity, even if it doesn’t always seem immediately politically expedient (1997: 44–5). For it is philosophically vital that we acknowledge violence as human, rather than as solely masculine. In Patricia Pearson’s terms, it is also important that we ‘develop a vocabulary of motive that incorporates concepts of female power and accountability’ (1998: 232), so that we don’t undermine the rationality of some female aggression. Moreover, we need to accept female violence as a possibility so that violent women can receive help if necessary. As Pearson

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observes, ‘women have virtually no access to anger management counseling, sex offender therapy, child abuse prevention programs, and prison security – all because we won’t concede their fundamental agency’ (1998: 238). The non-agentic recuperations of female sadists produced in the malestream law and media can no longer remain unchallenged. Certainly, analytic difficulties are raised due to the moral repugnancy of the crimes, but to ignore such cases is to allow their protagonists the refuge of the myth of female passivity. Homolka and Beck are important cases because through their own narratives of their crimes, they embody the slip from masochism to sadism inherent in Freud’s female beating fantasy. They make clear the false neutrality of spectatorship, in particular exposing the floating identification of the watcher from beater to beaten, revealing the sadistic pleasures the one who watches enjoys when they too finally begin to beat. Most significantly, they show that women possess the potential for sadism, even though this has been repressed, denied, submerged under an avalanche of protestations regarding the innateness of female masochism.

Conclusion An odyssey around violent female subjects

The semiotics of women and violence: THE GUN WENT OFF, SHE STOPPED BREATHING. (Crosbie, 1997: 24)

This study developed from a desire to understand why denying the agency of women who kill was so exceptionally important to mainstream legal and media discourses. For this need, it seemed, structured these discourses’ entire presentation of such cases, from the choice of which stock narratives framed the story to the very language in which these tales were told. Analysis of this topic has led me to consider the trauma murder can engender in and of itself in the society in which it occurs. It has also required investigation of the range of stock stories available to women within the discourses under study, and the various strategies those stories use to deny agency. It has raised questions about how the convention of narrative closure affects the discursive production of subjectivities. In particular, understanding the methods by which certain narratives aim to recuperate female protagonists through returning them to a ‘proper feminine place’ is crucial to any investigation of how and why the denial of female agency occurs. Last, but by no means least, this project has demanded examination of feminist narratives of women who kill and metanarratives regarding the institutions of law and media developed as alternatives to and critiques of dominant, mainstream interpretations. Murder, as I observed in Chapter 1, can be read as productive of social trauma because it invokes the abject and therefore remains perhaps the most culturally inassimilable of acts. The corpse is, as Julia Kristeva tells us, the most abject of objects, reminding us of our own inevitable deaths, starkly prefiguring our own decay. For the corpse, unlike abject substances such as faeces or blood, is not something we can reject and remove ourselves from; instead, it shows that we too will ultimately become waste. Its existence arouses our anxiety due to our inability ever to entirely dissociate ourselves from the fate of our own deaths, causing us to repress or deny its unmistakable message, yet perpetually haunting our experience of life. Murders demand our attention because they demonstrate not only our fragile hold on

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life, but also the tenuous power of the law. Yet they have a paradoxical relation with Western legal institutions, both upholding their necessity and undermining their authority. Murders, then, are decidedly ambiguous and unsettling events, requiring explanation and resolution. Yet the narrative closure promised by the criminal’s arrest offers only an illusory peace. For if murders are considered as traumatic events, then they, like trauma, as Freud noted almost eighty years ago, will remain forever beyond society’s ability to completely understand or control. When women kill, the threat murder poses expands exponentially. In Chapter 1 I considered many of the reasons for this, including women’s powerful early role as mothers, deemed by many theorists to lead to male fear of women, and the dichotomous images of good woman/bad woman which primarily male historians, philosophers and writers developed to encompass this fear. Women who kill can be interpreted as embodying and personifying the myth of the ‘bad’ mother, reminding their society of all humans’ initial vulnerability and dependence on the whims and caprices of the women who care for them. Mainstream discourses’ desire for explanation, and especially for narrative recuperation, is thus particularly apparent in stories of female killers. I developed a model of subjectivity based on narrative and performance to allow me to discuss the crucial role that mainstream legal and media stories of women who kill have in Western heteropatriarchy’s constructions of the feminine and of female gender performatives. This model has integrated Seyla Benhabib’s concept of a narrated self with Judith Butler’s of performative subjectivities. Identities are distinguished from subjectivities, yet are not considered accessible without them. Identity, thus, represents the manifold of potential and actual subject positions. These positions are discursively constituted through narration and performance, and correspond with genres extant within different discourses. So a variety of subjectivities are available within any given discourse and their narration and performance conform to specific generic imperatives. The difference between subjectivity and identity, then, is that the latter is an encompassing of all the actualities and possibilities of the former. Identity is made partially visible through the narration and performance of various subjectivities whose production is constrained and enabled via discourse. However, each narration and performance of subjectivity is never entirely determined by discourse; instead, narratives and performatives of subjectivity are similar to scripts which are extant before a specific articulation, but which allow each performer to enact the role in his or her unique way. Each enactment of subjectivity does not exhaust identity; for identity exceeds the sum of its representations via narratives and performatives of subjectivity. Yet this theory does not imply an identity which stands behind the subjectivities, directing and producing the performance; rather, identity is only visible through narration and performance and cannot be divorced from them. Subjectivity and identity are, thus, utterly intertwined and any separation between them must remain purely theoretical.

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In stressing the importance of narrative in subject construction, this model of subjectivity showed how mainstream and feminist legal and media institutions’ perceptions and treatment of women who kill are enormously influenced by the stories these institutions tell about such women. This emphasis also meant that the study remained a discourse analysis, rather than attempting to reach any general sociological conclusions regarding female criminality. The focus has been solely on these discourses’ narrational techniques: what narratives were told, what story formats were invoked, and what sorts of subjects and concepts of agency were produced. The six case studies have provided the possibility to concentrate upon specific narratives, while also distinguishing general discursive imperatives and stock stories influential in the construction of female subject positions within the discourses under observation. So, although I have invoked certain totalizing terms, such as ‘women’, ‘feminist legal discourse’ and ‘mainstream law and media’, I have done so deliberately and self-reflexively in order to trace the constitution of some narratives of subjectivity of women who kill and to determine their effects on the cases of individual women. Thus, conventions common to mainstream legal and media storytelling, like narrative closure and recuperation of female protagonists, have been identified, and their usage in particular cases delineated. In this manner, I have both noted overall trends and detailed specific instances, grounding my findings in actuality while eschewing the danger of attempting to speak for all ‘women’, or indeed on behalf of all members of any of the discourses discussed. One of my less surprising discoveries has been that mainstream law and media use a very limited range of stock stories about women who kill. In general, women are viewed in these discourses, as I noted in Chapter 2, through the lenses of domesticity, pathology and sexuality, as wives, mothers, whores or daughters. Moreover, when women come into contact with these discourses, they are categorized in terms of normative feminine roles, and are evaluated on the basis of their manifestation of either ‘madness’ or ‘badness’, insanity or wickedness. Recently, a third narrative has become popular which depicts some female killers as impotent victims, more sinned against than sinning. Feminist legal theorists, in particular, make use of victim narratives to encourage judicial consideration of context and oppression in female defendants’ cases. However, although this most recent narrative is important in recognizing elements other than individual volition in the commission of crime, it has also, as Hilary Allen noted, been instrumental in the production of reports which deny that female criminals ever act intentionally throughout their entire lifetimes. As presently formulated, then, these discourses’ narratives of subjectivity for women who kill restrict their portrayal to that of mythic evil or else to the impotence of victimhood or madness. Nowhere, it seems, is the presentation of a woman who is both violent and agentic, responsible and human, possible in these discourses. Men, on the other hand, are all too prone to narratives of agency

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and responsibility, even when, as Allen observed, their cases may not warrant such ascriptions of blame. She explains: [T]o accept that men are men and that their crimes can be dangerous and wicked need not blind us to what is painful and disordered in their experience, nor to the possibility that their inner troubles might warrant compassion or treatment. And to accept that women are women and that their inner lives are sometimes tragic or bewildering or constrained need not obscure the fact that women also have lives in the material world, and responsibilities for those lives that no amount of psychiatry can erase. (1987a: 122) It is time for the pendulum to swing to the middle for both men and women, allowing men the occasional benefits of psychological explanation and women the infrequent advantages of agentic retellings. Otherwise, as a culture, we remain locked in the male autonomy/female passivity model which comprehends the actions of both genders unsatisfactorily and incompletely. Feminist legal discourse, on the other hand, exhibits a tendency to focus on the cases of some female killers and to ignore others. As I observed in Chapter 2, the cases narrated within this discourse at present fall into two groups: the victims of oppression and murderesses whose stories form feminist revenge fantasies. Others, such as female sadists, are rarely discussed, if at all. Their exclusion helps define the contours of the violent female subjects produced by feminist legal discourse. As has been made evident in my later discussion of the case studies, these subjects tend to retain the qualities of nurture and care found in more traditional formulations of ‘good’ women, combined with an awareness of their own victimization and heteropatriarchal tyranny. Their killings are, thus, usually considered to have been precipitated by their own maltreatment and that of those around them, at times even resulting because of their connectedness to others, such as their children, rather than from a failure to care. Women who kill are often presented under this discourse, then, as having done so from a literal lack of options, not because they were naturally aggressive or sadistic. Even though feminist theorists do acknowledge the importance and the validity of women’s rage at their circumstances and their treatment in male-defined societies, few concede a feminine potential for sexual torture or enjoyment of another’s misery (Kirsta, 1994). My attempts to comprehend why women were presented in such limited ways in mainstream legal and media discourses, and why feminist theorists appeared to constrain their consideration of female crime to a particular spectrum of criminal acts, have led to the question of agency. With reference to the model of narrated and performative subjectivity, agency is defined as an effect of narratives, which means that it too is discursively constituted.

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Following Judith Butler, portrayals of agency are considered to result from depictions of particular subject positions, constructed and performed within discourses. Where particular discourses provide narratives of subjectivity with impoverished accounts of female agency, representations of the agency of female killers are similarly impoverished. Explicit strategies of agency denial, involving victimism, monsterization and mythification, are particularly plain in the narratives of the six case studies. Even within feminist legal discourse, agency is – perhaps unwittingly – denied to some female killers via victim narratives. Drawing attention to the lack of agency evident in some narratives of female violence, and to the particular types of female killers excluded from certain discourses’ purview, does not imply any positive or negative evaluations of specific models of agency. Rather, the point is to show how the truncation of agentic possibilities, be they considered positive or negative, constitutes a very important pillar of heteropatriarchal culture. Hence, I have been less interested in judging female behaviour in this study, than in determining why female agency, whether in the service of good purposes or bad, should be denied at all. The importance of nonagentic portrayals of women becomes clear when philosophical and legal definitions of the human are investigated. As was discussed in detail in Chapter 2, Western philosophy and legal discourse have generally tended to predicate concepts of the human on masculine ideals. According to these discourses’ narratives of masculinity and femininity, men are considered to possess the autonomy, independence and reason of full human subjects. Women, on the other hand, due to their deficient powers of reason, are posited as rather lesser subjects (Lloyd, 1986). In legal discourse this translates into the idea of the ‘reasonable man’, which tacitly elides narratives of femininity (Kennedy, 1993). The ‘reasonable man’ is narrated as responsible for his actions, but not necessarily culpable for them if he acted in defence of himself, his family or friends, or his property. However, in this tale he retains his agency at all times. Even when provoked into a rage, during which he assaulted or murdered, this narrative can argue that he was temporarily out of control due to the victim’s behaviour, but that he had not permanently lost his reason nor his responsibility. For the ‘reasonable man’ is considered, by definition, to be reasonable, and to act as any other man would in the same situation. Women are usually narrated as unreasonable and irresponsible when they encounter the legal institution. As I pointed out in Chapter 2, female criminals are relatively unusual when compared to the numbers of male criminals, and concepts of a ‘reasonable woman’ have, therefore, been deemed unnecessary (Kennedy, 1993: 238). This means that women’s responsibility and agency is not automatically presented, as is the case with men. Instead, the subject positions through which women who kill are usually represented either mythify and monsterize them as evil, dismiss them as insane, or depict them as oppressed and therefore non-responsible victims. In all instances, however, these narratives deny females agency, which is one of the

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most crucial characteristics of the ‘reasonable man’ and, therefore, of full human legal subjectivity. Women who lack agency also lack the chance to argue in defence of their actions: if they cannot claim that they acted of their own volition in the first place, then they are denied the opportunity to claim that their acts were reasonable and justifiable. Yet the ability to prove these characteristics is vital to the legal defence of self-defence, which is a complete answer to a charge of homicide and results in no penalty for the defendant. All other defences which acknowledge non-agentic defendants result in varying degrees of punishment. This situation has resulted in particularly paradoxical anomalies in the three cases considered where battered women had killed their partners. The use of Battered Woman Syndrome in the third case meant that Erika Kontinnen could only claim self-defence by insisting her killing was reasonable because she was suffering from a trauma-induced syndrome at the time. Hence, her response to extreme abuse was only reasonable for women with that syndrome, and not reasonable per se. Erika Kontinnen, then, was only reasonable insofar as she was suffering from a syndrome which caused her to believe that unreasonable actions were in fact reasonable. Her agency was compromised, as her actions were considered to have been precipitated by her male partner’s abusiveness and not by her own decision to save herself and her family from certain death. Non-agentic women are, thus, never reasonable in the same way as a ‘reasonable man’ is; their rationality is always in question, their responsibility always partial. This is not to suggest, as I have argued in Chapter 3 and elsewhere, that increased recognition of agency should result in increased or decreased culpability and therefore in harsher or lighter sentences. It is rather to insist on parity and equivalence of treatment for men and women under the legal system, so that women, like men, can assert agency and responsibility, yet also justify their crimes, especially when, like many battered women who kill, they commit them in self-defence. Denials of female agency, however, are crucial to decreasing the threat women killers pose to the dominant, male-dominated institutions of heteropatriarchy. If a woman can be found to have been so victimized that she did not know what she was doing when she killed, or if she is portrayed as a mythic, inhuman personification of wickedness, then the radical implications of her acts are muffled, her challenge to oppression nullified, at least as far as the dominant purveyors of cultural meaning are concerned. She is returned to her place of passivity and silence. The convention of narrative closure appears to demand recuperation of female protagonists in the stories told in mainstream legal and media discourses. Annette Kuhn discusses this imperative in relation to classic Hollywood film narratives in Women’s Pictures (1982). She points out that this recuperation involves the woman, who motivates the plot through her ‘troublesome’ presence, finally accepting a ‘normative’ female role. If the character is so transgressive as to be unable to return to her ‘proper feminine place’, she is outlawed. In this way, ‘order is returned to the world’, the threat of female

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disobedience vanquished. However, this process is not always completely effective; there are cases where ‘the narrative sets up questions that cannot be contained by any form of closure’ (1982: 34–5). Recuperation in Hollywood narratives occurs, then, at the expense of women’s autonomy; those who refuse to sacrifice their independence are cast into the realm of what Judith Butler calls the ‘unliveable’. Legal and media tales of women who kill are uncannily similar to these movie plots. Female killers are either recuperated to their ‘proper place’ through victim narratives which reassert their passivity and compliance, or they are outcast, made mythic, through tales of feminine evil. In either case, order is restored within the dominant, hegemonic world, and this order primarily rests on women’s lack of agency. Yet, as the case studies have shown, narrative closure is a comfort not always or permanently achieved. Reassertions of agency and reinterpretations of recuperative stories are ongoing, especially within feminist legal discourse, meaning that the complete containment of the narratives of women who kill is, like Derrida’s understanding of justice, always already aporetic. Determinations of which women are recuperable and which are not depend on how well they perform the female gender performatives of mainstream legal and media discourses and feminist legal discourse. For, as was demonstrated in Chapter 2, all three discourses encode certain forms of female behaviour and these both precede and inscribe narratives of female subjectivity. Women, like Mrs R., Pamela Sainsbury and Erika Kontinnen, who performed the roles of ‘good’, self-sacrificing wife and mother in the mainstream discourses, and of oppressed and angry victim in feminist legal discourse, are far more recuperable than women, like Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck, who enacted the roles of female sadist and dominatrix extant in discourses like pornography. For even though a certain amount of pornography is purveyed via mainstream media discourse, female sadism is generally hidden. The ordering of the case studies demonstrates this progression from most to least recuperable violent female subjects. Accordingly, the case study chapters began with the cases of battered women, Erika Kontinnen, Pamela Sainsbury and Mrs R. These cases were chosen specifically because they demonstrated the implications of the introduction into the mainstream of a new, feminist-inspired, narrative of female subjectivity, the woman suffering from BWS. There is no starker reminder that recuperation of female killers takes place at the expense of their agency than in the comparison between the case of Mrs R., which did not have the benefit of this new tale, and the cases of Pamela Sainsbury and Erika Kontinnen, which were both ‘explained’ via its precepts. Although the admission of evidence regarding the women’s psychological reaction to the battering they endured meant that both Sainsbury and Kontinnen had smoother passages through the justice system, R. nevertheless emerged as a more agentic model of womanhood at the end of her trials. R.’s recuperation was, thus, never quite complete; her narrative of rage and responsibility still surfaces through the gaps and cracks in the tales told by those who

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attempted repeatedly to undercut it. R. is particularly interesting because, while she undoubtedly was made to appear a stereotypical ‘good’ woman in the defence’s, and even in the prosecution’s, tales, and also fills the role of angry and oppressed victim in feminist legal discourse, she still retains her own image as a responsible and rational woman defending herself and her family from unwanted and unwarranted abuse and attack. Whilst she acknowledges her oppression, she rejects her victimhood; as she achieves good wifehood, she murders her husband. The case of Tracey Wigginton, covered in Chapter 4, reveals even more ambiguity than the cases of Kontinnen, Sainsbury and R. Mainstream legal and media discourses initially outlawed Wigginton with their tale of vampiric lesbianism. Certainly, she was deemed to have acted, but her agency was that of an inhuman myth, not a flesh and blood woman. The fear Edward Baldock’s murder produced, particularly for straight, white men, who became painfully aware that they were no longer in control of the streets after dark, was diluted through this narrative, which cast Tracey Wigginton as a dangerous outcast now rendered harmless via imprisonment. Headlines proclaiming that ‘Queensland is now a little safer with kill-forblood knife murderer Tracey Avril Wigginton behind bars’ (Petersen and Gagliardi, 16.2.91) made this intention explicit. After her conviction, Tracey Wigginton’s psychiatrists chose to present her as a victim who murdered because she was traumatized by childhood experiences of physical and sexual abuse. Her diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) implied radical questioning of her agency and responsibility for her crime. According to the psychiatrists, the woman calling herself Tracey Wigginton was not even present at the murder; her other personalities had actually killed Baldock. Her agency was not only reduced by previous trauma, then, it was entirely displaced via MPD. Tracey Wigginton’s own story, told six years after the murder, largely reiterated this psychiatric victim narrative, presenting her actions as those of someone who was ‘out of control’ and barely knew what she was doing. It is, of course, entirely possible that Tracey Wigginton has deliberately chosen to enact this performative in a bid to eventually gain parole. Nevertheless, her inscription within psychiatric discourse, whatever her motives, serves as a recuperative challenge to her outlawing as a vampire. Mainstream law and media chose to ignore these attempts at recuperation and reasserted the vampire narrative at every opportunity. Feminist work, on the other hand, has tended to examine the mainstream constructions of the case, rather than provide new narratives for the protagonist, although, as Deb Verhoeven has noted, Tracey Wigginton was narrated as a feminist revenge fantasy in some, less public quarters. This more private retelling, however, combined an acknowledgement of agency with an element of mythification, thus maintaining Tracey Wigginton as a larger than life character. Ultimately, Tracey Wigginton’s excessiveness and the intensely threatening nature of her murder of Baldock to society’s most powerful group –

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white men – meant that she, like transgressive women in classic Hollywood films, would continue to suffer mainstream rejection even in the face of plausible recuperative narratives. Her non-performance of mainstream female gender performatives was very important in her persistent rejection; Tracey Wigginton failed to perform her femininity in the ways expected of her within the institutions of law and media. Although she attempted to play the non-agentic victim role allotted her in psychiatric and, to a lesser extent, feminist discourses, her femininity was too antithetical to that prescribed in the dominant institutions to ensure her success. Instead, legal and media representations ridiculed her as little more than an inadequate man, while paradoxically demonizing her as a man-hating lesbian. Hence, the case of Tracey Wigginton is transitional in this study, between the recuperable battered women and the utterly outcast female sadists. For Tracey Wigginton was narrated as a recuperable subject, yet, due to her inadequate enactment of conventional female gender performatives, mainstream law and media actively disallowed her this public subjectivity. The cases of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck, detailed in Chapter 5, principally demonstrated the distancing and monsterizing manoeuvres dominant institutions engage in when forced to countenance female sadism. Yet even here some recuperation was undertaken, albeit desultorily. Beck and Homolka were presented as, on the one hand, the evil manipulators of their male partners and, on the other, as their innocent dupes. Early in the cases, in the hope of assuaging assumed public horror at the involvement of women in these crimes, the mainstream press produced recuperative tales, such as that Karla Homolka had been coerced via battery to rape and murder, while Valmae Beck had helped her husband do the same to save her marriage. However, these stories were entirely subverted both by their own excess and, more importantly, by other narratives telling of the women’s enjoyment of the rapes and murders. The only response possible in mainstream law and media to such performances of femininity was outcasting. For, as I discussed in Chapter 5, female sadism is not supposed to exist and remains deeply repressed within Western heteropatriarchy. As a consequence, Homolka and Beck were made monstrous, horrific incarnations of female desire perverted. Interestingly, Homolka’s and Beck’s excessive performances of the role of wife can be read as mimetic, to use Irigaray’s term, demonstrating the frightful results of heteropatriarchy’s demands of women who play this role, which when taken to such an absurd degree actually subvert themselves. However, the feminist theorists who might have discussed these cases in this way remained silent. Indeed, the feminist silence that surrounds these cases is, in terms of this study, their most important aspect. For this lack of feminist representations makes explicit the limitations of feminist legal discourse’s female gender performatives, which represent only particular violent female subjects. While political exigencies might explain the exclusion of some violent women from feminist purview, mainstream representations of those very

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women nevertheless continue to help delineate concepts of the feminine. When the agency of women like Karla Homolka or Valmae Beck is mythified and made monstrous, or denied through innocent victim portrayals, the possibility of female sadism and aggression is denied also. When these women are not deemed fully responsible for their own cruelty, then the accountability of all women for their acts is somehow in question. If feminist theorists cannot acknowledge the full range of female behaviour, from nurture to torture, then the mainstream discourses never will, and women’s achievement of full human subject status under the law will be forever in doubt and, at best, will remain partial. The cases of Homolka and Beck thus present worst-case scenarios, where mainstream discourses denied female agency through monsterization, mythification and even victimism, and feminist theorists were silent, preferring to ignore rather than accept that women are as capable as men of condemnable and abhorrent acts. At the outset I discussed my usage of a ‘toolbox’ methodology, whereby I deployed theories when they suited my purpose and discarded them when others were more relevant to achieving my objective. This methodology is most apparent in my analysis of the case studies. The cases of the battered women were considered through the lens of legal theory because the narratives told of them were founded on which legal defences they employed. Hence, questions of agency, my prime object of study, were most clearly delineated depending on whether the women asserted self-defence or provocation. Indeed, their cases proved most vividly my argument that agency is a result of the narratives told and is therefore discursively produced. The act is hereby theoretically separated from the accounts of that act. Agency for the act is provided by the narrative told of it; it is not inherent in the act itself. However, in practice acts cannot be divorced from the tales told of them, and for this reason those accounts and their denials or affirmations of agency are vitally important when women kill. Tales of provocation or diminished responsibility, for instance, provide only impoverished accounts of agency, so any narrative of subjectivity founded on these assertions will necessarily present subjects who, at least temporarily, lacked full responsibility and thus full agency for their actions. On the other hand, narratives which are based on the defence of self-defence assume an agentic subject. Legal arguments surrounding battered women’s use of such defences were, then, vital to considerations of their narratives of subjectivity and to the degrees of agency they were ascribed. The case of Tracey Wigginton, however, was largely narrated, in both law and media, as a tabloid-style horror story. Popular culture’s fascination/repulsion reaction to the abject, in particular to the mythic vampire, was crucial to representations of agency in this case. In part, Tracey Wigginton’s narratives of subjectivity are intelligible using psychoanalytic theory regarding myths of female evil, male fear of women, and social uncertainty about extimate objects, like vampires. At the same time, these narratives were also considered as examples of popular cultural ‘moral panics’

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(Cohen, 1987), in order to understand why Wigginton’s later recuperative narratives were so soundly rejected in mainstream discourses. Narrative construction did not specifically depend on the choice of legal defence in either this case or the two that followed, because all three women pleaded guilty. Thus theories from discourses other than the legal became important in their subject construction. Psychoanalytic theory appears central to constructions of the subjectivities of Homolka and Beck. In particular, Freud’s narration of the female beating fantasy, and its implications for cultural understandings of female sadism, can be seen as founding the dominant discourses’ complex reaction to these cases, and demanding their repeated attempts to deny female agency. This fantasy can even be read in the women’s own stories of the rapes and murders they helped commit. Hence, although ‘moral panics’ were evident in these cases, full consideration of them was eschewed in favour of an excavation of the operation of this Freudian fantasy as mediated through mainstream law and media. The feminist silence regarding these cases seems also to stem from uncomfortable suggestions that female sadism, far from being a repressed desire from childhood, actually flourishes in some women. Indeed, as Michelle Massé has made clear, the original narration of the fantasy is itself ambiguous, allowing always for potential feminine enjoyment of another’s pain and suffering. Many feminist interpretations of the feminine, however, have stressed nurturance and care as primary characteristics; women’s cruelty to others has, by contrast, received far less attention. So analysing the cases of Homolka and Beck through the lens of psychoanalysis has shown that both mainstream reactions and feminist neglect can be connected to the same antecedent. The need to deny these women’s agency, especially through distancing techniques, was so extreme because the need to avoid recognition of female sadism is apparently paramount in all three discourses. Any one lens or school of thought was, thus, inappropriate for the type of understanding I have sought of these case studies. Instead, my object of analysis, narrations of agency in the subjectivities of women who kill, suggested, indeed insisted upon, a new focus for each of these chapters. In this way, a more complicated picture of how these narratives deny agency emerged, allowing the exploration of the symbiosis between mainstream law and media, and their relationship with feminist legal narratives and metanarratives. This picture also allowed the intricate interweaving of the cultural capital of stock stories with multiple discursive imperatives present in all narratives of subjectivity to be shown. To a large degree, then, this study has examined the imaginary components of mainstream and feminist legal and media discourses in preference to their more conscious practices and operations. Narratives of subjectivity have been assumed to be based as much on existing stock stories, which form part of our unconscious sense of the culture we live in, as on the pragmatics of legal defences and journalistic news values. The stories told about

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women who kill are thus both ancient and contemporary, specific to their cases yet relevant for societal understandings and formulations of the feminine. This is not to suggest that either stories or understandings are inevitable. The real project, especially for feminist theorists, is to undertake what Butler calls the resignification of discourse. Vicki Kirby has critiqued Butler’s understanding of this process, arguing that Butler appears to posit ‘an origin that is discrete from representation’ (Kirby, 1997: 123), a ‘reality’ that can be made sense of in various ways – resignified – but which somehow remains always already beyond interpretation. Rather than resignifying this ‘lost object’, Kirby suggests we follow Derrida and view Butler’s ‘real’ as a succession of iterable moments. For the iterable has no exteriority; it doesn’t refer to anything outside itself; it doesn’t provide an illusory sense of origin (Kirby, 1997: 122–3). While Kirby doesn’t disagree with Butler’s project as a whole, which is, as she describes, ‘to contest the economy that invests a proper subject with the belief that he is not made of the same devalued matter, indeed, not made of matter at all’ or, in other words, to challenge the ‘nature/culture division and why it matters’ (1997: 128), she insists that the matter of nature itself is not passive or inert or inarticulate. Instead, matter in Kirby’s terms comes into being with its signification, its iterability. It speaks through its repetitive resignifications, and each one is as much an articulation of the matter of nature as the last. Iterability is not about repetition in the sense of repeating within spatial and temporal dimensions, but about moments that reconstruct anew cultural products, such as performatives, via acts of citation which paradoxically defer to irrecoverable authorities (Kirby, 1997: 121). Indeed, the authority to which an individual act of citation defers, such as the law for instance, becomes the very act of deferral itself. To resignify discourse, then, in the sense in which I propose it, is, through citations of legal and media authorities, to iterate and reiterate the matter, the stuff, of female violence in more agentic narratives. In this way, female violence would come into being in different guises, and so too would the women who commit murder and other aggressive and sadistic acts. This reiteration is necessary for all women who kill, whether their homicides are morally condemnable or justifiable – resulting from desperation or perverse pleasure – for to ignore some in preference to others means to implicitly deny women a full range of emotions, capacities, desires. Moreover, as Patricia Pearson observes, the consequences of our denying female violence merely demeans the right our victims have to be valued. And it radically impedes our ability to recognize dimensions of power that have nothing to do with formal structures of patriarchy. Perhaps above all, the denial of women’s aggression profoundly undermines our attempt as a culture to understand violence, to trace its causes and to quell them. (1998: 243)

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Limit cases, like those of Homolka and Beck, can be interpreted as providing the most cogent delineations of the contours of the mainstream’s female gender performatives, and thus the instances which reveal precisely the obstacles in the way of a feminine attainment of full human subjectivity under legal discourse. These cases make plain that we need to fight the power of legal and media discourses to produce mandates of feminine behaviour by turning them against themselves, and producing ‘alternative modalities of power’ which utilize resources already extant, even though, as Butler states, they are ‘inevitably impure’ (1993: 241). In this way, we can create a future where women are viewed as subjects and agents who are capable of great care and connectedness, yet who also can behave callously and sadistically. For equivalent rights, as Drucilla Cornell reminds us, do not mean equality in the sense of sameness (1992b: 293), but respect for diversity and difference and, most of all, a concept of the human.

Notes

1 Traumatized discourses: narrating violence 1 Freud argued that trauma was an experience which the individual could not assimilate and therefore repressed, eliminating its memory from consciousness. The psyche, however, remained unfinished with the event and continued to manifest anxiety and emotion due to the inability of the ego to come to terms with the event (Freud, 1919b: 210, 1916–17: 274–5). 2 I have borrowed this term from Lynda Hart, 1994. 3 Many studies have been conducted into this apparently near universal male fear of women. Some of those used in this book include Hays, 1966; Theweleit, 1987; Cixous and Clément, 1986; and Creed, 1993. 4 A third is the psychiatric institution; however, for reasons of space and time I have eschewed its consideration for now at least. 5 I have taken my understanding of Foucault’s methodology from his three essays: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1984), ‘Truth and Power’ (1984) and ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy and History’ (1984). 6 The terms ‘media’ or ‘news media’ indicate the dominant news media, such as the major circulation newspapers and commercial and government-funded television and radio channels. Alternative newspapers and community radio and television stations and programmes are not considered to form part of the ‘dominant media’ institution, although at times their material may well be similar to that of their mainstream counterparts. The term ‘dominant’ is used because, in terms of audience reach, the media so described are pervasive. Furthermore, such media are dependent for funding on either federal governments or upon highly successful entrepreneurs, both of whom are part of the coalition of dominant groups which uphold hegemony in Western societies. 7 Ian Freckleton explains in The Trial of the Expert that: Experts do not come into the courtroom as disinterested observers. They are generally sought out by one or other side in legal proceedings, requested to make a report to the legal representatives, paid for that and, if the report coincides with the arguments which the lawyers wish to put forward in the case, asked to testify. (cited in Odgers, 1988: 9) 8 Much feminist work has been carried out on battered women who kill. Lenore Walker (1984, 1990) has written several books on the topic, and writers such as Ann Jones (1980); Angela Browne (1987); Patricia Easteal (1992, 1993); and Julie Stubbs (1991, 1992), among many others, have also contributed to theorizing of this subject. Writers like Ania Wilczynski (1991) and Allison Morris (1987) have written extensively on women convicted of infanticide. Lynda Hart (1994), among others, devoted a chapter of her book to the case of Aileen Wuornos, while Tracey Wigginton has been discussed by

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several feminist theorists (Verhoeven, 1993; Davies and Rhodes-Little, 1993; Millbank, 1996; Creed, 1996; Higgins, 1994). However, cases like those of the female sadists who form the subject of Chapter 5 are not canvassed in feminist discussions. In my review of a number of recent feminist legal texts I found that women like these were not included at all and, in most cases, violence was considered to pertain largely to men, especially in the case of the crimes of rape and assault (Mason, 1995; Davis, 1995; Gelsthorpe and Morris, 1990; Kelly, 1990; Hudson, 1990; Smart, 1989; Cook and Bessant, 1997; Robson, 1992; Daly, 1994; Roach Anleu, 1991; Daly and Maher, 1998). This discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis is refracted through feminist critiques such as Jane Flax’s Thinking Fragments (1990), Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a), Dorothy Leland’s ‘Lacanian Psychoanalysis and French Feminism’ (1992), Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990b), and Drucilla Cornell’s Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference (1993). Although the boy’s castration anxiety is directed at his father during the phallic stage of psychosexual development, his only method of resolving his Oedipal conflict is to identify with his father in order to avoid punishment for desiring his mother. This means that he must essentially reject his mother as the cause of his anxiety in the first place (i.e. desire for the mother was the catalyst for the castration anxiety). The lesson, then, is that desire for the mother is supremely dangerous, and that fear of the father must be repressed in order for the boy to become like him and so enter society. This fear is then projected on to the mother. I use the term ‘recuperation’ in a similar way to Annette Kuhn in Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. Kuhn states that classic Hollywood film narratives have a tendency to ‘recuperate’ female characters by returning them to normative female roles. If their transgression is too extreme, however, they are outlawed or even killed off (1982: 34–5). In this way, Kuhn asserts, ‘order is restored to the world’ (1982: 34). I argue that this same imperative exists in the narratives of female killers found in the discourses under study, whereby such women are either represented through traditional feminine roles (wife, mother) or excluded from the realm of civilization entirely as inhuman and evil. Moreover, this ‘recuperative’ or exclusionary process works in these narratives to provide resolution and restore order, just as it does in classic Hollywood narratives. I use this term to signify the semiotic recuperation of the representation of women who kill, rather than intending its more sociological meaning indicating a return to health or social usefulness. In this context it suggests a process whereby a protagonist in a threatening event (e.g. a murder) is made acceptable within the narratives told in the dominant institutions of heteropatriarchy.

2 Versions of the self: narrating the subjectivities of women who kill 1 This claim is not without some validity. As Evelina Giobbe, president of a support group for ex-prostitutes, pointed out: ‘Aileen’s fears [of sexual assault] are not unfounded. Close to 2000 men a year … used her in prostitution. So [that means around] three to six a day. [T]hat seven [in a year] may have sexually assaulted her fits with the stats that are in there [regarding rates of sexual assault for women in prostitution]’ (interview with Geraldo Rivera, cited in Hart, 1994: 142). 2 MacKinnon is usually considered a Marxist feminist theorist, re-evaluating Marxist theories of production and reproduction in the light of feminism. However, her work also explicitly relies upon the concept of the female victim, oppressed by patriarchy, and to this end provides support for the development of the victimology thesis within feminist thought. 3 Ngaire Naffine argues that the ‘reasonable man’ standard is also classed, founded on a very specific model of masculinity, which is:

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Notes considered desirable by a dominant, middle class type of male who is able to earn a living through his intellect rather than with his hands. … There is nothing crude, earthy, coarse or physical about the man of law. Instead his is a distinctive masculinity … of the boardroom or the legal chambers, not of the football club. (1990: 118)

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The ‘reasonable man of law’, then, bears virtually no resemblance to the vast majority of actual defendants, whether male or female, who come before the court (Naffine, 1990: 131). See, for instance, Edwards, 1984; Heidensohn, 1985; Naffine, 1987; Smart, 1976; Morris, 1987; Worrall, 1990; Mukherjee and Scutt, 1981; Carlen and Worrall, 1987; and Weisheit and Mahan, 1988, to name but a few. My conclusions regarding the Aileen Wuornos case and my concepts of its legal and media narratives have been drawn primarily from two major sources: Hart, 1994 and Russell, 1992. The alienation of lesbians from mainstream society will be discussed more fully in chapters 4 and 5. These include reversals of assumptions surrounding prostitution and feminine remorse. Wuornos refuses to repent either of her prostitution or of her murders. She insists on the humanity of the prostitute and her vulnerability to rape, pronouncements which are still, inexplicably, treated with surprise in many quarters. Furthermore, Wuornos refuses to evince publicly required remorse for the deaths of her white, middle-class victims. Instead, according to Hart, Wuornos revels in these homicides which reverse class relations and traditional subject/object relations. Wuornos refuses to recuperate her image and assuage male fear through a ‘proper’ display of feminine remorse, instead remaining angry and unrepentant throughout her case. (See Hart, 1994, for further discussion of these points.) According to Robert Ressler, who coined the term ‘serial killer’ and developed FBI identification criteria, such killers kill three or more times, in more than three different locations, on more than three separate occasions, with a cooling-off period in between. They usually kill from sexual motives as the issues of power and sex have become inextricably intertwined in their minds. Many serial killers were sexually abused as children, and many come from impoverished, disadvantaged backgrounds, as do their usual victims. Finally, all known cases of serial killers are male (cited in Russell, 1992: 358–9). MacKinnon argues that any attempts to assert feminine specificity merely reaffirm the conditions of women’s subordination. Even female sexuality is constituted by and for men, and is used to keep women under domination. MacKinnon tends to elide ‘fuckees’ with those whom I would call ‘actual women’, yet she continually makes reference to the ‘real’ experiences of ‘women’. However, as ‘fuckees’ lack feminine specificity, we must assume they are not able to experience anything as actual women, but must endure their whole interaction with the world as totally defined through the male gaze. I am attempting to separate the strands and implications of her argument here by placing MacKinnon’s use of woman as ‘fuckee’ in scare quotes. In dubbing her the ‘world’s first female serial killer’, the media effectively masculinized Aileen Wuornos’ behaviour, as hitherto all serial killers were considered to have been men. For further analysis of this point see Lynda Hart, 1994. Piaget has written extensively on this topic (e.g. 1950, 1952, 1965). Kohlberg, (1969, 1973, 1976, 1981), has analysed Piagetian theory in one text (1981) and in a number of essays. There is no necessary incompatibility between rights and responsibilities, but Kohlberg’s approach makes it appear so. It is really a matter of definition. In terms of Kohlberg’s ideas, one’s responsibility is formulated primarily as to claim one’s legal rights and to respect those of others. In Gilligan, on the other hand, one’s responsibilities are a more personal affair and are tied to one’s connectedness with others rather than with legal principles. For a discussion of Gilligan’s denial of female anger see Hayles, 1986.

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15 West does not take into account the fact that some men also live with a pervasive fear of the violence of other men. Much male violence is directed at other men, in particular towards those in marginalized groups. Gay men, for instance, are as vulnerable to attack as lesbians, and male prostitutes often suffer similar treatment to female ones. 16 I am not suggesting Wuornos’ version is the only valid ‘truth’ in this case. Rather, I use her narrative as an example of a story of female suffering to demonstrate how unpalatable these tales frequently are in heteropatriarchal societies and particularly in dominant institutions like the law. 17 He admits that the term ‘aporetic experience’ is paradoxical, because experience, for Derrida, implies a journey, a possibility, a passage, and an aporia is that which does not allow passage; it is a ‘non-road’ (1992: 16). 18 I rely on Derrida’s essay ‘Force of Law’ and Drucilla Cornell’s essay ‘The Philosophy of the Limit: Systems Theory and Feminist Legal Reform’ (both in Cornell, 1992a: 3–67; 68–91) for this interpretation of Lévinas’ ideas. Cornell notes that Lévinas’ and Derrida’s concepts of justice are virtually identical. She observes that Lévinas’ argument that justice ‘demands the recognition of the call of the Other which always remains a call and can never be truly answered’ is very similar to Derrida’s understanding of justice as an aporia or ‘the limit to what is’ (1992a: 87). 19 Butler uses the Althusserian term here. Althusser defined interpellation as the process through which individuals are ‘compelled to identify with the representations which their culture supplies’ (in Silverman, 1983: 218). According to Kaja Silverman’s exploration of this term in The Subject of Semiotics: ‘interpellation designates the conjunction of imaginary and symbolic transactions which results in the subject’s insertion into an already existing discourse’ (1983: 219). 20 Access to court records is severely curtailed, however, and this means that newspaper discourses can assume a legitimacy based on the fact that more people read and understand them. Hence, although some discourses are viewed as more credible and more legitimate than others, populist discourses like those of the mass media often bear a greater responsibility for cultural meanings and interpretation than do their more highly socially valued counterparts. 21 Austin denotes these two kinds of speech acts as illocutionary and perlocutionary (cited in Butler, 1997: 3) 22 For instance, Lynda Hart uses these terms in this way throughout her text Fatal Women, and defines them in a very similar manner to the way in which Butler defines subjectivity. She stresses, for example, that ‘identities’ are constructed retrospectively and result from ‘structural effects’ of discourse; that they are historically contingent, fluid and multiple (Hart, 1994: 9, 91). 23 Lois McNay critiques Benhabib’s work, among others, for developing a limited account of agency and subjectivity due to her intense individualistic intersubjective focus, which leads to a domesticated concept of difference (2000: 12).

3 Inconceivable survivors: battered women who kill 1 This case is still subject to suppression orders which prevent the disclosure of the full name of Mrs R. or that of any of her children, and also disallow publication of any material likely to lead to the identification of any of the family. 2 Note here that I refer only to cases of heterosexual domestic violence. Lesbian domestic violence homicides are not usually read through this fantasy. 3 Bronislaw Malinowski, cited in Rasche, 1990: 32. 4 In Australia, for instance, according to statistics from the Australian Institute of Criminology, ‘[b]etween a third and a tenth of all Australian women are victims of domestic violence’ (Westbury, 1991: 82). This statistic is echoed in the United States, where ‘[t]he most conservative figures estimate that women are physically abused in twelve per cent of marriages, and some scholars estimate that as many as fifty per cent or

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more of all women will be battering victims at some point in their lives’ (Mahoney, 1991: 11). This term refers to all women living in or separating from marriage-like relationships with a male partner. In line with the studies under discussion, it does not indicate women suffering domestic violence within lesbian relationships. For example, The Domestic Violence Attitude Survey, conducted in Australia in 1987/88, found that 20 per cent of respondents condoned the use of physical force by the man against his wife in some circumstances, including the woman arguing with or disobeying the man, failing to keep the house clean, refusing to sleep with him, sleeping with another man, and failing to have the meals ready on time; 33 per cent considered domestic violence a private matter; more than 25 per cent said they would ignore a case of domestic violence in their neighbourhood; and nearly 50 per cent claimed that they personally knew of either a victim or a perpetrator of domestic violence (Earle et al., 1990: 2–6). The Women’s Coalition Against Family Violence study, Blood on Whose Hands? (1994), references many cases where the police refused to act in domestically violent situations. (See in particular chapter 2 ‘Permission to Kill’ , pp. 33–50.) See also Stubbs, 1990 and Ferraro, 1998, for further examples of studies which confirm this point. See for instance, Patricia Easteal’s Australian study Killing the Beloved (1993), which analysed coronal and court records in New South Wales and Victoria from 1989 to 1991 relating to homicide between adult sexual intimates. Lenore Walker’s study The Battered Woman Syndrome alleges that in the United States charges of first and second degree murder are more common for battered women who have killed their husbands than for men who have killed their wives (1984: 142). Easteal’s study confirmed these findings, concluding that issues of control over the women they lived with or had lived with were vital catalysts in the homicides men committed (1993: 83–6). These findings were again confirmed by Fiona Manning (1996: 7–8). Otto Pollack advanced his theory of the masked nature of female crime in 1961. This theory contended that women committed just as many crimes as men, and maybe more, but because women were deceitful, they could mask their crimes and so not be prosecuted. He also claimed that women who were prosecuted were very often let off due to male chivalry operating in the justice system (cited in Flowers, 1987: 97). This idea has persisted. Journalist Glenys Bell stated in an article in The Bulletin that ‘judges have tended to be more lenient towards a woman’ (1981: 60). For example, education and child health are only two of the areas in which the state dictates to families certain requirements for rearing children, and enforces them at times with the aid of legal sanctions. Susan Moller Okin provides a thorough analysis of the ways in which justice does not extend to the private world of the family in Justice, Gender and the Family. She points out that family violence and marital rape are still not accorded serious treatment by the courts; that, until fairly recently, women gave up all rights to property and wage earning upon marrying; that marriage contracts have legally compelled women to perform unpaid domestic labour; and that children have traditionally had little recourse against their parents even in instances of severe abuse (1989: 128–31). The private, especially, is now seen to increasingly traverse the public sphere and is itself constituted by the same relations of power and sociality which dominate the public (McNay, 2000: 71). Life imprisonment refers to a sentence of imprisonment for the term of the offender’s natural life. Walker claims that although this cycle does not happen in all battering relationships, it was found to be present in two-thirds of the 1600 incidents reported in her studies on battered women (1990: 42).

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17 See Paciocco for details of this case and its impact on Canadian law, especially the law of self-defence (1999: 297ff). See Stubbs and Tolmie for a discussion of the effect of the Lavallee decision on Australian criminal defence law (1994: 197–9) 18 See Stubbs and Tolmie for a useful summary of early uses of BWS testimony in Australian courts following the Kontinnen decision (1994: 199ff.). 19 Downs observes that the architect of BWS theory, Lenore Walker, has nowhere provided, either in court or in her writings, ‘a single example of a battered woman who is responsible for her actions in any way’ (Downs, 1996: 148). 20 BWS evidence was accepted in most Western courts within about six years after the publication of Walker’s study in 1984. 21 See R v Ahluwahlia (1992) AllER 889 and R v Thornton (1992) AllER 307 for reports of the appeals in these cases. See Radford, 1993, and Kennedy, 1993, for discussions of the trials, appeals and retrials of these cases. 22 The details of the cases which follow were deemed indisputable by all involved and are taken from transcripts of their trials (R v R, 16.7.81; R v R (1981) 4 A.Crim.R. 127; R v R, 26.11.81; R v Runjanjic and R v Kontinnen (1991) 56 SASR 114; R v Runjanjic and R v Kontinnen (1991) Crim.L.J. 15 445; R v Kontinnen, 30.3.92). The transcript of the trial of Pamela Sainsbury has been shredded by Plymouth Crown Court, as is common practice in Devon when a case is more than five years old and has not resulted in any appeal. I did contact the investigating police officer but was informed that no information still existed in the police department about this case which could be released to me. I have, therefore, relied on newspaper coverage and on discussion of the case in various texts, such as Kennedy, 1993, and Radford, 1993. Media coverage of these cases has been restricted to articles from dominant, mainstream newspapers. Television and radio coverage has not been considered because of difficulty of access. Please note that newspaper articles are referenced by the author’s surname where available; otherwise, the name of the paper and the date has been used. 23 Tess Rod, 1980, states that 40 per cent of the victims of women are their husbands. 24 For instance, Michel Foucault points out in his genealogy of the modern prison, Discipline and Punish, that in the late 1700s husband killing or parricide (literally murder of the father) replaced regicide (murder of the king) as the ultimate crime in the crime calendar and was thus deserving of the worst of penalties (1977: 113–14). 25 This term is used to indicate a specific defence proposed by legal theorist Charles Ewing, who argues battered women could allege constant psychic danger causing a fear of psychic death or loss of self due to continued attacks on self-esteem and self-worth as a rationale for murdering abusive spouses. (See Ewing, 1987, for further elaboration.) 26 Carol Gilligan notes in In a Different Voice, for instance, that feminine virtue has traditionally lain in self-sacrifice (1982: 132) and that service to others is often considered as goodness in women (1982: 66). She also observes, however, that these traits are ‘directly in conflict with the concept of rights that has, in this past century, supported women’s claim to a fair share of social justice’ (1982: 132). 27 One of the features of the learned helplessness which Walker claims affects most battered women is an inability to escape: fear effectively causes paralysis, not action. 28 Other commentators have also asserted that self-defence is the most applicable defence for battered women who kill and have therefore insisted on the need to broaden its current coding. (See Rogers, 1996, and Schneider, 1992, for only two of many examples of work making similar appeals.)

4 Cultural anxiety and vampiric voracity: Tracey Wigginston’s ‘hunger’ 1 Female vampires became increasingly common in vampire fiction of the Victorian period, in particular within the Decadent movement beginning around the late 1850s (cited in Frost, 1989: 43), and continued throughout the 1880s (Frost, 1989: 48). The female vampire’s place within vampire fiction has consolidated within the twentieth century,

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and narratives of her activities are now commonplace in horror films and fiction (Frost, 1989: 49ff.). Naturally, this argument does not apply to lesbian vampires who suck the blood of another woman and thus seem to have more closely replicated Joan Copjec’s relation of vampirism with breast feeding. Vampirism confers both life and death: ‘life’ to the vampire, and death to the victim. It also confuses the idea of the suckling baby, drinking essential mother’s milk, with the vampire sucking essential blood. Moreover, the vampire is not entirely dead or alive, but remains the ‘undead’. Vampirism’s interweaving of life and death is thus very complex and deeply unsettling. Creed notes that milk has traditionally been considered a pure substance and strict taboos are confirmed in the Bible against its mixing with blood, deemed one of the most abject of bodily emissions. Likewise, the vampire’s worldliness can be contrasted with the baby’s innocence and the victim’s naivete (1993: 70). I have restricted my consideration of the media reports on this case only to press reports found in mass-circulation daily newspapers, although there were many reports on television and radio. I have been constrained in my choice of material largely because of the difficulties associated with access to electronic media reports. My consideration of the legal discourse surrounding this case centres on transcripts of the accomplices’ trial and of Tracey Wigginton’s Mental Health Tribunal hearing, both of which I was fortunate enough to view in their entirety. This has not been the experience of all researchers into the Tracey Wigginton case. Indeed, two other researchers, Susanne Davies and Andrea Rhodes-Little (1993), were not granted similar access on the basis of The Criminal Practice Rules, Queensland 1900, Order IX, Rule 6(e) and (f), which states that only ‘specified agents of the Crown, the defendants, their legal counsel and others named in or immediately affected by the proceedings can be granted access’ (cited in Davies and Rhodes-Little, 1993: 27). Please note that newspaper articles are referenced by the author’s surname where available; otherwise the name of the paper has been used. For instance, Stewart MacArthur reported in the Australian that, according to Dr Mulholland, Ptaschinski suffered from a ‘delusion or near delusion’ that Tracey Wigginton was a vampire (7.2.91). The West Australian, however, neatly elided this qualification in their report which stated simply that the psychiatrist considered Tracey a vampire (7.2.91). The Courier-Mail, on the other hand, insisted that Tracey had proclaimed herself a vampire, which was not strictly true as this allegation was made only by her accomplices (8.2.91). Hence, a shift is effected which removes Tracey Wigginton’s vampire status from the realm of the ‘delusional’ and argues it to be medically asserted fact or at the very least, ‘self-proclaimed’. See, for example, Sydney Morning Herald, 2.2.91; Walker, 2–3.2.91. For legal presentations see R v Ptaschinski, Jervis and Waugh, 15.2.91, and R v Jervis (1991) 56 A.Crim.R. 374. The media referred to these themes throughout the whole of their coverage dating from reports on the accomplices’ committal hearing (see Courier-Mail, 31.1.90) through to the end of their trial (see MacArthur, 16–17.2.91a; Sydney Morning Herald, 16.2.91; Gagliardi, 16.2.91a; Petersen and Gagliardi, 16.2.91; Lamble, 17.2.91; Kerr, 17.2.91). Indeed, such themes were consistently expressed for years after the trial and convictions (see Williams, 12.9.92; Hansen, 2.5.93; Riggert, 25.5.96, 27.5.96). Vampires ‘lie’ in the sense that in the first instance they present themselves to their victims as something other than they are. Barbara Creed, for instance, describes the female vampire as ‘embracing’ her victims, ‘using all the power of her seductive wiles to soothe and placate anxieties before striking’ (1993: 59). Brian Frost also notes the ‘mask of pretence’ which vampires use to lure victims (1989: 44). Brian Frost notes that ‘large, lustrous eyes’ are standard hallmarks of the female vampire, and that their unsettling character stems from their suggestion of ‘monstrous fantasies and sanguinary orgies, mirroring the soul of one who has learned the secrets of the tomb and conquered death’ (1989: 44).

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11 The media reported every day of the accomplices’ trial and gave the case large features at its conclusion. This scale of treatment is common to trials deemed sensational. Other criminal trials reported in the media are often limited to articles detailing only the verdict and sentencing. This occurred in Tracey Wigginton’s own trial, which was summed up in two paragraphs on page 5 of the Courier-Mail (cited in Verhoeven, 1993: 95). 12 This information is itself suspect in any case. Gagliardi gives no evidence of how he determined this ‘contingent’ was indeed lesbian; he does not mention, for instance, that he interviewed any of these women. Presumably we are to conclude that lesbians are instantly recognizable, a marked group. Some interesting work has been carried out on this cultural stigmata (see, for instance, Walker, 1993). 13 I am quite well aware that ascriptions of psychological disorders are frequently used against women, especially in courts of law, and I am not suggesting that either this diagnosis, or a possible legal sentence of long term psychiatric treatment, would have been beneficial for Tracey Wigginton. My point here is only that an alternative story was available to the media and legal storytellers and yet was largely ignored, primarily and most importantly because such a story, in this instance, implied a deep challenge to the status quo. 14 Rockhampton was Tracey Wigginton’s childhood home town. 15 I have chosen these particular articles because, to my knowledge, they represent the total of feminist theorists’ coverage of the case within academic journals or texts. 16 Lombroso was an Italian psychiatrist who was among the first to study female criminality scientifically. He argued that certain people were ‘biologically predisposed’ to crime, and that these characteristics were both more common in female criminals and far more frightful in female than in male criminals. The ‘born’ female criminal was, thus, a personification of wickedness. Lombroso described her thus: ‘To kill her enemy does not satisfy her, she needs to see him suffer and know the full taste of death’ (cited in Davies and Rhodes-Little, 1993: 21; see also Lombroso, 1895; for a discussion of Lombroso’s theories, see Flowers, 1987). 17 See Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Fraser’s study The Lust to Kill, which includes discussion of the theme of the murderer’s transcendence of society and subjectivity as it is theorized in French existentialism (1987: 62ff). 18 As Lisa Walker, 1993, among many others, has pointed out, the ‘butch’ is the most sartorially visible lesbian, representing radical otherness and difference from dominant heterosexuality, and therefore, traditionally, the most vilified and discriminated against in the mainstream community . 19 This term has a long history beginning with the early sexologists Richard von KrafftEbing and Havelock Ellis, who invented the image of the lesbian as a man trapped in a woman’s body (see Ellis, 1895, and Krafft-Ebing, 1965). Perhaps the most famous narration and literary interpretation of these theories is Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1982, first published 1928), whose protagonist styles herself as a man and a prototypical ‘butch’. 20 Judith Butler (1993) has problematized the facticity and naturalness of ‘sex’ in Bodies That Matter. 21 According to the Weekend Truth, for instance, Tracey Wigginton rode her motorbike in an ‘aggressive, masculine’ manner, but drove her all Australian ‘family car’, a Holden Commodore, like ‘a helpless female’ (cited in Verhoeven, 1993: 114). 22 Her clothing, physical size and violence all contributed to Tracey Wigginton’s description as masculine or ‘butch’. Furthermore, her masculinity is considered excessive, leading only to murder; she clearly could not control the aggression she unleashed when she ‘acted like a man’ (Verhoeven, 1993: 115). However, she fared no better when she ‘acted like a woman’. Although she could appear ‘quite feminine’ to the men she had sex with (Hansen, 10.2.91) and enticed Baldock into her car with promises of sexual favours, the pregnancy she desired eluded her (Hansen, 10.2.91) and the very ‘strength’ of her personality denied any girlish coquettishness or naivete (Petersen and Gagliardi, 16.2.91).

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23 These female demons are united, according to H. R. Hays, in their power ‘to destroy men, either by magically undermining their vitality or by sucking their blood’ (1966: 141). All were vampires and cannibals. Lilith, however, also killed men by having sex with them at night against their will, thereby draining them of potency (Hays, 1966: 141–6). 24 Male identification with the victims of sex crimes is relatively unusual as men are generally the aggressors in such crimes and women the victims. 25 Ptaschinski had been admitted to Royal Brisbane Hospital, Ipswich General Hospital and the Mater Hospital 81 times across a five-year period and to the Biala Centre for short-term treatment for alcohol and drug addiction 40–50 times across the same period. Almost all her admissions were a result of self-mutilation or overdosing. Her psychiatrist, Dr Peter Mulholland, described her as aggressive towards both others and herself (R v Ptaschinski, Jervis and Waugh, 15.2.91). 26 According to her defence (R v Ptaschinski, Jervis and Waugh, 15.2.91), Tracey Waugh did not realize that a plan to kill was in existence on the night of the murder, even though she admitted having been present at two planning and preparation meetings during the week prior!

5 Beyond villainy: the ‘limit’ cases of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck 1 Crimes of sadism are usually considered ‘masculine’, and sexual violence against women is most often depicted as more commonly male behaviour. (See Kirsta, 1994 and Pearson, 1998, for examples of such characterization.) Women who do engage in sadistic acts of sexual violence against other women are considered to transcend ‘common’ villainy in their apparent motivelessness, their ferocity and their repetition, as well as in their uniqueness, for women who murder and sexually torture young women are relatively rare in the annals of crime (French, 1996: 40; Kirsta, 1994: 168–9). 2 Other commentators have also noted this feminist disinterest in analysing cases where women have performed crimes of sexual sadism against other women (c. f. Kirsta, 1994; Pearson, 1998; Fitzroy, 1997). 3 Cases of other women who have killed and tortured children and young women, such as those of Myra Hindley, Rose West, Martha Beck and Patricia Moore, have all suffered from this dearth of research. See Birch, 1993, and Cameron and Fraser, 1987, for the only feminist work on Hindley; and Knox (1998) for the sole feminist analysis of Beck I could find. Amanda Matravers, from the University of Cambridge, has recently completed a three-year study of female sex offenders in Britain, whose offences ranged from indecent photography to sexual murder. Her findings are reported as similar to my own, concluding that ‘such offenders … challenge the dearly held beliefs that women are incapable of sexual aggression’, and that our cultural inability to acknowledge women’s propensity for such crimes may prevent offenders developing any sense of responsibility for them (Matravers, 19.2.01). 4 Myra Hindley, with her partner, Ian Brady, raped and murdered five children and buried their bodies on the Yorkshire Moors in 1963–4. During the twenty-seven years since their sensational trial, Ian Brady has been largely forgotten in the public imagination, spending his time in an asylum for the criminally insane. Myra Hindley, on the other hand, has been the focus of continued opprobrium and is frequently described still as ‘the most hated woman in Britain’ and as a sexual deviant with extraordinary powers of charismatic influence over others. (For further information see Birch, 1993.) 5 This ‘evil manipulator’ image presents Hindley as especially wicked because it claims that she seduced Brady into rape, torture and murder. It has a long history of precedents, including perhaps most notably the biblical Eve. 6 Kaja Silverman describes it in her paper ‘Masochism and Male Subjectivity’ as the ‘most crucial text’ in understanding this phenomenon (1993: 48).

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7 The sentence he uses to describe this beating fantasy, ‘a child is being beaten’, reveals the grammar of the fantasy and makes evident the modifications it must undergo before its final incarnation (Laplanche, 1995: 118). 8 The male version of the beating fantasy is, by contrast, overtly masochistic in all its elements. The major studies of masochism, such as those undertaken in the first half of the last century by Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1965) and Theodor Reik (1962), have focused upon the dramatization of male masochism. Indeed, even the term ‘masochism’ was named by Krafft-Ebing after another theorist, Baron von Sacher-Masoch, who was the first to describe the male masochist’s experience in Venus in Furs (1989, first published 1925). Later studies of masochism, like Gilles Deleuze’s influential work Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty (1989), concentrate upon SacherMasoch’s study and deal exclusively with male masochism. Due to their particular focus, these studies are not considered in this chapter, which concerns itself only with female masochism and thus with a very different beating fantasy. 9 These are ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’ and ‘Female Sexuality’ (cited in Massé, 1992: 69). 10 Massé cites Freud’s use of this Nietzschean formula in relation to sadism. For instance, she quotes his conflation of the two in his Introductory Lectures (1916–17), wherein ‘the instinct for mastery … easily passes over into cruelty’, and also from his essay ‘Disposition’, where he states: ‘the instinct for knowledge can actually take the place of sadism. … It is at bottom a sublimated off-shoot of the instinct for mastery, exalted into something intellectual’ (cited in Massé, 1992: 78–9) 11 Freud’s work is described in the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, for instance, as having ‘revolutionized the popular view of human nature in the West … and it has penetrated into almost every nook and cranny of our culture’ (1977: 334). Nick Mansfield agrees, stating that ‘the whole field of twentieth century culture … exhibits the fundamental insights of Sigmund Freud and his followers’ (2000: 25). Simone de Beauvoir analysed the impact of his construction of Woman on Western thought in her groundbreaking study The Second Sex, arguing that in terms of prestige and authority psychoanalysis constituted the new Western religion (1949: 70). Many other more recent feminist theorists have also followed this line. For instance, Linda Hart observes in her most recent text that while Freud is not the ‘gospel on sexuality’, he has produced ‘texts that have invaded Western culture’s unconsciousness’ (1998: 26). 12 The information cited here was obtained from Bernardo’s trial transcript notes Paul Kenneth Bernardo v Queen, 1.5.95. 13 This information was taken from trial transcript notes: R v Valmae Beck, 19.10.88; R v Barrie Watts, 29.1.90; and R v Valmae Beck (1989) 43 A.Crim.R. 135; and from Valmae Beck and Barrie Watts, Transcript of ‘Interview’, 14.12.87. Media coverage of both these cases is represented by articles from dominant mainstream newspapers. As in the other cases, television and radio broadcasts proved too difficult to access. Please note that newspaper articles are referenced by the author’s surname where available; otherwise the name of the newspaper and the date have been used. 14 This conversation was recorded by the police without the informed consent of either Beck or Watts. It took place on 14 December 1987, immediately after Beck’s confession. The tape and a transcript of the conversation were later admitted into evidence in the trials of both accused. 15 Tellingly, it took Valmae Beck one-and-a-half hours to read her statement, longer than the pair spent with their victim in the first place (R v Valmae Beck, 19.10.88). 16 Beck was not being extensively questioned during this response, she was replying to a single question: ‘ “Describe what events took place between yourself, Watts and Sian Kingi?” ’ (R v Barrie Watts, 29.1.90). 17 Transcripts of the tapes, and descriptions of their content, are found in Bernardo’s trial transcript, and in coverage of the trial in the Toronto Sun, the Toronto Star, and the Globe and Mail.

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18 Michelle Massé notes that although the literature on beating fantasies insists that there is no correlation between the fantasy and the desire for actual abuse, some studies have found a correlation between sadistic fantasy and a desire to actually abuse. Interestingly, a link between masochistic fantasy and a desire for physical abuse was not found. It would seem, then, that sadists are more likely to seek out victims for actual abuse, while masochists are more inclined to prefer fantasy to reality (1992: 64). 19 Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Fraser also found, in their examination of the case of Myra Hindley in their study The Lust to Kill, that women involved in sadistic crimes are seen as far more wicked than any man (1987: 25). 20 This information was cited in reports on the case from its first mention on 13 October 1988 during Valmae Beck’s trial until shortly after the conclusion of Barrie Watts’ trial on 11 February 1990. (See Johnston, 13.10.88; Australian, 13.10.88; Courier-Mail, 14.10.88; 21.10.88; 6.2.90; Budd and Rowett, 8.2.90; McGregor, 10.2.90; 11.2.90 for examples of this coverage.) 21 Mehera San Roque has critiqued Pearson’s thesis on violent women, arguing that she isolates each of the cases she analyses from its socio-legal context, preferring to utilize a kind of gender blindness in her view that all violence is somehow equivalent (1999: 47). I agree with this critique in general; however, Pearson’s remarks on Homolka do have validity in terms of my argument on the possibility that Homolka’s acts may well demonstrate willingness, rather than result from coercion. 22 Metaphorically, the murder victim was like her daughter, being much younger. Literally, Beck was the mother of daughters of the same age as Sian Kingi. 23 The persistence of the stigma associated with lesbianism is made clear in a short article in the Sydney Morning Herald discussing the lesbian tendencies of Myra Hindley and Rose West, which concluded: ‘Both are … considered to be sexual deviants who enjoy sadism and lesbian affairs’ (Evans, 25.11.95). This analogy of lesbianism with sadism is not surprising, as Freud considered sadism an active male instinct and lesbianism has long been equated in mainstream literature with women’s desire to be men. (See Lauretis, 1991, and Garber, 1992, for two quite different approaches, of the many such studies currently extant, to lesbianism’s historical positioning as a form of male desire.) 24 See Creed, 1995, for a useful overview of the various representations of lesbians in Western culture. Lynda Hart also includes a good analysis of the image of the evil lesbian in her discussion of the film Single, White Female in Fatal Women (1994: 104–23). 25 Indeed, in Karla Homolka’s case, the Crown went to a great deal of trouble to insist that she was not a lesbian, calling seven witnesses to the stand to attest to her lack of same-sex desire (Paul Kenneth Bernardo v Queen, 1.5.95). Karla herself was so vehement in her own protestations of heterosexual loyalty that eventually Christie Blatchford felt the need to comment that the inscription ‘Karla Homolka: Not a Lesbian’ should be written on her tombstone (13.7.95). 26 I am differentiating here between the malevolent mother and the mother who commits infanticide. Many feminist studies of infanticide have been carried out. Comparatively few, if any, however, have been undertaken on mothers like Valmae Beck, and Rose West, who sexually torture and finally murder older girls. 27 Humm (1992) provides a useful general summary of the history of feminism. 28 Andrea Dworkin’s Right Wing Women (1983) offers an extensive discussion of the meaning and implications of antifeminism for feminism. 29 The roles of willing slave and dominatrix are common throughout the history of pornographic writing. Early examples, such as de Sade’s Justine (1966) written in the eighteenth century, include representatives of both these roles. Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1989, first published in 1925) includes a female sadist, while the later classic The Story of O (Réage, 1972) concentrates primarily on the exploits of its passive female protagonist. Innumerable contemporary films and popular books also involve women performing both roles. Interestingly, these roles also appear in some lesbian pornography

Notes

30

31

32

33

34

35

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(see Califia, 1993 and 1994a, and some of the stories in Newman, 1995, for only a few examples). The term ‘pornography’ does not imply a specific form of sexuality, but relates to representations of sex and to common stock stories or scenarios used to narrate sexual encounters, and, in this usage, especially violent sexual encounters. ‘Pornography’ functions as a discourse, or as several discourses, which provide particular representations or stock narratives of subjectivity and agency (see Kappeler, 1986, and Lewallen, 1988). Although it can be argued that the mainstream discourses’ depiction of them as having killed ‘for love’ bears a marked similarity to the pornographic portrayal of ‘willing slave’. Furthermore, as pornography is central to Western heteropatriarchal culture, Homolka and Beck’s enactment of performatives from this discourse can be considered mainstream representations. Nevertheless, I wish to draw a distinction between mainstream legal and media discourses and pornography, even though in these cases they show their aptitude for symbiosis. (For further discussion of the centrality of pornography to Western heteropatriarchy see Caputi, 1988, especially pp. 161–9.) Witness, for example, the continuing debate over the consequences of children’s viewing of sex and violence on television, culminating in the introduction of the ‘V’ chip to allow parents to screen out all sexually explicit and violent material from the programmes received. Benjamin, for instance, considers ‘erotic domination’, and in particular the masochistic fantasy The Story of O (Réage, 1972), in her work on the subject (1984: 292–311). Some feminists have undertaken work on sadomasochism, and in particular female sadism; however, such studies remain relatively rare in the annals of feminist theory. Pat Califia, in particular, has written a great deal about the politics of S/M sex and her self-professed sadism. However, the sadism she speaks of remains strictly within the confines of consensual S/M scenes. (See, for instance, several of her essays in Public Sex.) Angela Carter’s work The Sadein Woman (1979) is one of the classic studies of the Marquis de Sade’s oeuvre, and of pornographic fiction in general. Her study of de Sade’s Juliette is particularly interesting in the context of this chapter; however, it necessarily remains an analysis of fictional sadism rather than a consideration of actual sadism such as that performed by Beck and Homolka. Gayle Rubin and Lynda Hart have also discussed S/M, in particular lesbian S/M, but, as in the case of Califia, they analyse it as a consensual sexual practice (see Rubin’s essay ‘Thinking Sex’ (1984) and Hart, 1998). This fantasy is a function of the masculine economy of desire analysed earlier, whereby men’s supposed desire for the other, for women, is really a desire for a narcissistic fantasy of Woman. Lacan argues in this context that what man ‘relates to is the objet a, and that the whole of his realization in the sexual relation comes down to fantasy’ (cited in Cornell, 1992a: 91). Due to the privileging of male desire in Western heteropatriarchy, this ‘psychical fantasy’ has assumed cultural significance and is influential in the creation of the stereotypes and gender performatives by which women order their lives. This is not to suggest that Homolka and Beck were themselves intentionally acting mimetically, as the focus here is not on determining the ‘truth’ by returning to the original ‘source’ of the acts. Rather, it is to provide only another possible method of reading and analysing these cases as sociocultural phenomena.

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Index

abjection 1–2, 5 acts 32, 61 acute battering incident phase 75 The Age of Sex Crime (Caputi) 16 agency 24–7; Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) 95–6; defences to murder 174–5; determined agency 102; double gesture 6–7; and narrative 174; narrativity and performativity 61–3; new models of 25; sense of agency 61; social dimensions of 59 Ahluwahlia, R v 79 Aileen Wuornos (documentary) 38 Allen, Hilary 22, 34, 35, 166–7 Althusser, Louis 54 amnesia 35, 94 anger 42, 97–8 Astor, Hilary 26 Austin, J.L. 54 Australia: Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) 67, 76, 95; child sexual abuse 113; diminished responsibility defence 72; domestic violence 69; guilty pleas 105; murder sentences 71; ‘reasonable man’ concept 33 autonomy of subject 32 ‘bad’ labels 33–4 Baldock, Edward 104–5, 128–30 Baranek, P.M. 14–15, 19 Barr Snitow, Ann 160 Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) 74–8; and agency 95–6; conditions of existence 96; critiques of 76; dangers of testimony 88; development of 76; in evidence 67; incapacitating aspects of 90; recuperation 68; as a straitjacket 78; theorizations of 22 battered women: amnesia 35, 94; anger 97–8; behavioural patterns 75; definition of 75; determined agency 102;

diminished responsibility defence 72, 95; key questions 74–5; learned helplessness 75–6, 77; and the legal system 46; media portrayals 19–20; paradox of 67; privacy 92; provocation defence 73; recuperation 68, 100–2; self-defence 73, 95; statistics 68–9; victim status 101 beating fantasy 136–40, 187n8 Beck, Valmae: abduction and rape 141, 142; beating fantasy 140; enjoyment of 142–3, 152–3; femininity of 146; and feminist legal theory 134–6; gender performance 157–61; lesbianism 154; masochism 151–2; media responses 135, 153–4, 155; mimetic identification 162; motherhood 147; pornography 158–60; recuperation 162, 173; sadism 151–2; spectatorship 143; Watts’ domination of 151–2 Benhabib, Seyla 7, 10, 53, 58–9, 61 Benjamin, Jessica 160 Bennett, W. Lance 11, 12 Bernardo, Paul 140–1, 148–9 Birch, Helen 135 Blatchford, Christie 146, 148 Bloch, Dorothy 26 blood 2, 126 Bodies that Matter (Butler) 2, 57 Bonaparte, Marie 152 boys, rights-based morality 42 Braidotti, Rosi 60–1, 161 Brennan, Teresa 9 Britain: Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) 76, 79, 95; diminished responsibility defence 72, 94; murder sentences 71; ‘reasonable man’ concept 33; spouse killing statistics 69 Broomfield, Nick 38 Brown, Wendy 63

208

Index

butchness 123, 124–5, 185n18 Butler, Judith: critiques of 58–60; double gesture 6–7; gender performance 123, 127; identity 57; performative subjects 53; psyche 55; resignification 176; sense of agency 61; trauma 2, 11 Canada 33, 76 Caputi, Jane 16, 18 Card, Claudia 125 Carrington, Kerry 5 Case, Sue-Ellen 127–8 castration, threat of 138 challenge strategies 12 Chan, J.B.L. 14–15, 19 Cheah, Pheng 37, 47–8 ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ (Freud) 136 children: beating fantasy 136–8; boys’ rights-based morality 42; fantasies of 26; girls’ immaturity 41–2; sexual abuse of 113, 120; violence against 23, 135 choices, capacity to make 32 citizenship 21, 50–1, 94–5 ‘co-referentiality’ 11 Cocks, Joan 78 Cohen, Stanley 15 collusion of law and media 37–40 common sense 13–14 communication of experiences 62–3 compensation 43 confessions 120–2 ‘constitutive outside’ 3 context 21, 35–6, 64, 134 contrition phase 75 Copjec, Joan 107–8, 113 Cornell, Drucilla 48, 49–50, 161, 177 corporeality in law 47–8 corpses 1–2, 106 Cover, Robert 36, 54 Creed, Barbara 106, 107, 115, 125, 133 crimes, components of 71 Daly, Kathleen 8, 22, 23 Davies, Susanne 116 death sentences 54 defence, narrative strategies of 12–13 defences for murder 70–4 Deleuze, Giles 139 Delgardo, Richard 13 depression 98 Derrida, Jacques 15–16, 21, 48–50, 93 desire 154–5 Détienne, Marcel 132

difference see feminine difference theories difference/equality debate 45–7 Difference in Women’s Hedonic Lives (West) 43 DiManno, Rosie 151 diminished responsibility defence 72; agency 174; Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) 77; men and women compared 35; public/private split 94–5; and time 85; verdicts 71 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 120 ‘discourse’, use of term 8–9 discursive clashes, gender performatives and 157–61 discursive imaginaries 56 domestic violence: accountability 87; attitudes to 68, 69; ending of 101; external intervention 91; law and 69–70; marital discord 99; public/private split 70, 87, 92; trivialization of 69–70; women’s liberation 102 dominant news media see media; media narratives ‘double gesture’ 6–7 Downs, Donald 77, 78 Dutton, Mary Ann 77 Dworkin, Andrea 160 Einstein, Zillah 46, 47 empirical feminism 20–1 epistemology, and feminist jurisprudence 45 epistemophilia 138 equality/difference debate 45–7 equivalent rights 50, 64, 177 Ericson, R. 14–15, 19 ethic of care thesis 31 ethical thought, development of 41–2 Excitable Speech (Butler) 11 experience, theorization of 10, 62–3 expert witnesses, treatment of 19 ‘extimate’ 24 facialization 125 Fatal Women (Hart) 37–8 Feldman, Martha S. 11, 12 female desire 154–5 feminine difference theories: development of 40; difference/equality debate 46–7; heterogeneity 46–7; moral reasoning 45; morality 41–2; oppression 41; victimology and 41–5, 65 femininity 41, 130, 139 feminism 6, 20–1, 100–2, 156 Feminism Unmodified (MacKinnon) 41

Index 209 feminist cultural studies: ‘limit’ cases 134–6; silences 23; toolbox theorizing 4–7 feminist jurisprudence 45–53 feminist legal theory 40–53; acceptable cases 100; aims of 45; Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) 76; battered women 74–5; citizenship 50–1; corporeality in law 47–9; criminal types 158; equality/difference debate 45–7; fresh judgement 49, 93; law, place of 51–2; ‘limit’ cases 22–3, 134–6; meaning of 6; narratives and metanarratives 3, 20–4; phenomenological symmetry 50; radical alterity 50; range of subjectivities 3; victimology and difference theories 41–5 feminist silences 155–63; and cultural studies 23; gender performatives and discursive clashes 157–61; and legal theory 22–3; mimetic identifications 161–3; on other killers 186n3 feminist victimology theories 22, 40, 41–5, 65 femme fatale 155–6 Fitzroy, Lee 27, 163 Folk Devils and Moral Panics (Cohen) 15 foreclosure 55 Foucault, Michael 21, 110, 120 Fraser, Mariam 59 freedom of subject 32 French, Kirsten 141 fresh judgement 49, 93 Freud, Sigmund 136–8, 139, 178n1, 187n11 Frost, Brian 105, 107, 126 fuckees 41 Fugler, Alan 89 Gallop, Jane 135 Gatens, Moira 51 gender: bias 3; gender mobility 125–6; gendered male 32; performatives 123–8, 157–61 ‘genre’ and discourse 8–9 Getting Away with murder (Paciocco) 12 Gilligan, Carol: ethic of care thesis 31, 41–2; feminine difference thesis 45; girls’ immaturity 41–2; victimization 40 girls, immaturity of 41–2 good wives 156, 162 Grabosky, Peter 16, 17–18 Graycar, Regina 13 Grosz, Elizabeth 37, 47–8 ‘grotesque body’ 123–4 group identity 21

Guilliatt, Richard 113 guilt, sense of 138 Hansen, Peter 126 Hart, Lynda: Aileen Wuornos 37–8, 39; external intimacy 24; female desire 154; incest survivors 96; mimeses 161 Hays, H.R. 26 ‘hedonic’ lives 43 heterogeneity 46–7 Higgins, Christine 117–18, 128 Hill, Edward 83–5, 89 Hindley, Myra 135, 159, 186n3, 186n4, 186n5 The History of Sexuality (Foucault) 120 Homolka, Karla: Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) 150; beating fantasy 140; as betrayer 146; enjoyment of crimes 152–3; femininity of 145; lesbianism 154, 188n25; a ‘limit’ case 134–6; masochism 151; media responses 135, 153–4, 155; mimetic identification 162; pornography 158–60; raping virgins 140–1; recuperation 162, 173; spectatorship 144; victimization portrayal 150–1; womanhood 146–7 Homolka, Tammy 140 homophobia 127–8 Horley, R v 76 horror fiction 117 Houlahan, Ray 150 ‘Icy Bernardo Chills Soul’ (Blatchford) 148 identity: formation of 61–2; identity-assameness 57; identity-as-selfhood 57; and subjectivity 57–8; and subjects 53–4 impartial reason 47 impotent victim model 65 In a Different Voice (Gilligan) 41 In the Name of Love (Massé) 138 incest 96, 113, 120, 137 independence of subject 32 infanticide 26, 135 insanity, defence of 34, 72 interpellation 54 ‘Interview with the Vampire’ (Riggert) 118–22 Irigaray, Luce 154, 161 Jackson, Bernard 11 Jervis, Kim 104, 105, 109, 123–4, 125 Journalism and Justice (Grabosky & Wilson) 16

210

Index

journalists 14, 17–18, 19 judges 37, 49, 54, 93 juries see verdicts jurisprudence, feminist 45–53 justice 45, 48–50, 52 ‘Kavanagh on Sunday’ 147–8, 154 Kennedy, Helena 33, 82 Kerby, Anthony 62 Kirby, Vicky 47–8, 50, 59–60, 176 knowledge 8, 45, 138 Kontinnen, Erika: amnesia 94, 101; BWS testimony 79, 87–8, 89–90, 94; defence tales 89–90; Erika and Olga’s story 83–5; the facts 80; newspaper narratives 92; prosecution tales 85, 86; recuperation 171; vengefulness 86–7 Kristeva, Julia 1–2, 106 Kuhn, Annette 170 language/representation 59–60 Lauretis, Teresa de 138 Lavallee, R v 76 law: authority of 11–12; courtroom portrayals 54; family violence 68; feminist jurisprudence 45–53; impartiality of 36; and justice 48–50; and media 19–20, 37–40; place of 51; power of 36–7; women’s oppression in 41 learned helplessness 75–6, 77 legal discourse: common sense 13–14; courtroom strategies 12; female criminality studies ignored 33; female ethical subject 35; meaning of 6; narrative and 11–14; passive women 34–5; range of subjectivities 3; reasonable man concept 32–3, 36, 169; stock stories 9, 12–14 lesbianism: alienation 37–8; butchness 123, 125–6, 127, 185n18, 185n19; female desire 154–5; representations of 125; and vampirism 105–6; and violence 116–17, 188n23 Lévinas, Emmanuel 48 ‘life stories’ 10 ‘limit’ cases 22–3, 134–6 Lloyd, Genevieve 32–3 Lloyd, Moya 59 Lombroso, Cesare 116, 185n16 loving contrition phase 75 MacKinnon, Catherine 31, 40, 45, 143 ‘mad’ labels 33–4

Mahaffy, Leslie 140 Maher, Lisa 8 Mahoney, Martha 68, 70, 74–5, 77 Male Fantasies (Theweleit) 26 male/female portrayal 150 The Man of Reason (Lloyd) 32 Manning, Fiona 98 manslaughter 71 marital discord 99 marriage and family 96 masochism 136–40, 187n8, 188n18 Massé, Michelle 138, 152, 187n10 Maynard, Douglas 12 McNay, Lois 10, 59, 61, 70 media: dominant news media 178n6; and law 19–20, 37–40 media narratives 14–20; expert witnesses, treatment of 19; hyperbole 18; male/female responses 147–8; morality plays 15, 18, 111; selection of 17–18; stock stories 15, 17–19; theory of 14–15 men: agency of 32, 166–7; desire 154; diminished responsibility 35; fear of women 2, 25–6, 128–9; male/female portrayal 150; violence of 16–17, 117, 187n8; wife killers 69; and women’s experiences 43–4 metanarratives 3, 20–4, 56 Milburn, Caroline 84 Millbank, Jenni 116–17, 126, 130 mimetic identifications 161–3 mind/body split 59–60 Monster with a Thousand Faces (Frost) 105 monsterization 25, 108, 111, 173 The Monstrous-Feminine (Creed) 106 monstrous maternal 155–6 morality 41–2, 45 morality plays 15–19, 111 Morgan, Robin 160 motherhood 23, 147, 156 motivation 33, 110, 163 Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) 112–15, 133, 172 murder, defences for 70–4 myths 16, 25, 26, 115–16, 117–18 Naffine, Ngaire: Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) 76, 77–8; battered women 74; domestic violence 69; feminine specificity 46; law 36 narrated and performed selves 7–11, 53–63, 64, 65–6 narrative and legal discourse 11–14 Narrative and the Self (Kerby) 62

Index 211 ‘narrative’, use of term 8–9 Naylor, Bronwyn 16, 72 neutral citizens 51 nurturing woman 156 objectivity 21 oppression 22, 26–7, 41, 45, 156 Paciocco, David 12 Papke, David Ray 11 passivity 34–5, 130–1, 139, 163 patriarchal mimesis 161 Pearson, Patricia 153, 159, 163–4 performed and narrated selves 7–11, 53–63, 64, 65–6 perverse verdicts 80, 85, 93 phallocentrism 41 phenomenological symmetry 49–50 police 19, 69 The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Stallybrass & White) 123 pornography 158–60, 188n29 Porter, Elisabeth 32–3 postmodern feminism 21 power 2, 8 power feminism 135 Powers of Horror (Kristeva) 106 precedent 36 projection 24 prosecution, narrative strategies 12–13 prostitution: alienation 37; male dominance 41; performatives 57; self-defence 38; sexual assaults and 30, 179n1; whore fantasy 9 provocation 72–4; agency 174; Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) 77; cumulative provocation 93; public/private split 94–5; verdicts 71 psyche 55, 178n1 psychoanalytic concepts 136–40, 175, 187n8 Ptaschinski, Lisa: charged with murder 104; delusions of 109; gender performance 123–4, 125; self-mutilation 186n25; trial of 105, 109 public/private split 68, 70, 91, 92, 94–5 queer practice 127–8 R., Mrs: accountability of 87; case ends 92; defence tales 88; the facts 79–80; myth and stereotype 78–9; newspaper narratives 90–1; portrayal of 101; prosecution tales 85, 86; provocation

defence 92–3; recuperation 100, 171–2; second trial 90–1; tales of 80–2; vengefulness 86–7; verdict 93 racism 5 Radford, Lorraine 74 radical alterity 50 radical pluralism 47 rape 62–3, 141–5 Rathus, Zoe 89, 93 rationality of subject 32 ‘real women’ 7–8, 10 ‘reasonable man’ concept 32–3, 36, 169 Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom (Bennett & Feldman) 11 reconstruction strategies 12 recuperation 100–2; film narratives 170–1; ‘limit’ cases 163; mimetic tales 162; nonrecuperable women 173; recuperable women 171–3; revenge fantasies 68, 172; use of term 28, 179n11 redefinition strategies 12 regression 24–5 rehabilitation 28, 179n12 reparation 78 representation 59–60 resignification of discourse 176 responsibility 32, 62, 92–100 revenge fantasies 28, 68, 86–7, 122, 172 Rhodes-Little, Andrea 116, 117 Ricoeur, Paul 10, 57, 58 Riggert, Ella 118–22 Rosen, John 146 Runjanjic, Olga 80 sadism 136–40; fantasies of 188n18; and femininity 135; knowledge 187n10; or masochism 145–55; to masochism 137–9 sadomasochistic partnerships 152 Sainsbury, Pamela: accountability of 87; BWS testimony disallowed 79; case ends 92; defence tales 88–9; diminished responsibility defence 93–4; the facts 80; her story 82–3; newspaper narratives 91–2; portrayal of 101; prosecution tales 85, 86; recuperation 171; vengefulness 86–7 Sainsbury, Paul 82–3, 87, 89, 91–2 sameness model 125 Satanism 108 Schneider, Elizabeth, Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) 76 Schopp, Robert 76, 99 scopophilia 138, 140 Scotland, R v 76

212

Index

Scott, Joan 62 self 21, 48–50, 57 self-defence 72–4; Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) 77; law 97, 99; masculine concepts of 64; necessity 96–7, 99; not allowed 85; principles of 22; in psychological terms 97; reasonableness 98; reluctance to use 98–9; rights 38; verdicts 71 Seligman, Martin 75 sentences 35, 54, 71 separateness of subject 32 serial killers 38–9 sexism 5 sexuality, politics of 127–8 silent murderers 110–11 Situating the Self (Benhabib) 7 Smart, Carol 33, 36, 45, 51 society 64, 101, 102 speakable discourse 55 spectatorship 136–40 speech acts 54 Stallybrass, Peter 123 standpoint feminism 21 Steed, Judy 148 stereotypes 9, 31 stock stories: and legal narrations 9; morality plays 15–19, 111; need for new 28–9; production of 7 Stubbs, Julie 99 subjectivity: and identity 53–4, 57–8, 61–2; models of 53–63; and psyche 55; range of 3; reasonable subject theories 32; stock stories 7; subject construction 55, 56 suicide pacts 71 symbiosis of law and media 32, 37–40 Telling Flesh (Kirby) 50 temporality 10 tension-building phase 75 The Dangerous Sex (Hays) 26 Theweleit, Klaus 26 Thornton, Margaret 47, 50–1 Thornton, R v 79 Threadgold, Terry 11 Tolmie, Julia 93, 99 ‘toolbox’ theorizing 4–7 Toronto Sun 151, 157 trauma: containment of 3; defence mechanisms 24–5; murder 1–2; psychoanalytic concepts 5; repetitive narration 10–11; repression of 178n1 truth 11–12, 21, 44

United States of America (USA) 76 universal grand narratives concept 21 unliveable, concept of 55–6 Urban Walker, Margaret 42 ‘Vampires, Breast Feeding and Anxiety’ (Copjec) 107 vampirism 105–8; lesbian vampires 128; media narratives 109; new version 122; popularity of 122–33; stock stories of 15; victims of 129 vengeance 86–7, 98, 122 verdicts, as speech acts 54 Verhoeven, Deb 115–16, 125–6 ‘victim feminism’ 135 victim stereotypes 31 victimism 25, 68, 101 victimization 43–5, 156 victimology theses see feminist victimology theories vilification 24–5 violence, cycle of 77 violence, men and women compared 16–17 Walker, Lenore 22, 35, 75, 77, 97–8 Ward, Elizabeth 113 Watts, Barrie 141–5, 148, 149–50 Waugh, Tracey: gender performance 123–4, 125; representation of 130–1; story 104–5; trial of 105, 109 West, Robin 31, 40, 43–4, 45 ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’ (Irigaray) 161 White, Allon 123 Whitford, Margaret 26 Why Battered Women Kill (Walker) 75 Wigginton, Tracey: accomplices 103, 104, 108–9; as author 118–22; childhood 114, 119–20; confession 118–22, 133; femininity of 126–7, 185n22; feminist responses to 114–18; gender performance 123, 124–8; justification 116–17; legal and media responses 107–11; lesbian community support 112; lesbianism 123, 124–5; Mental Health Tribunal 112, 114, 117–18; Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) 112–15, 133, 172; mythification of 115–16, 117–18; recuperation 28, 111–15, 172–3, 174–5; silence of 110, 116; her story 104–5; vampirism 105, 126; as victim 115–16 Wilczynski, Ania 33 Wilson, Paul 16, 17–18, 20

Index 213 Woman 21, 156, 161 women: definition of 6, 41; experiences of 43, 46; humanity of 21; role of 97; subordination of 161–3; women’s liberation 102; young women 23, 41–2 Women and Moral Identity (Porter) 32 Women’s Pictures (Kuhn) 170 Worrall, Anne 33 Wuornos, Aileen: ‘Dateline’ interview 38; defence narrative 39; discursive clashes 56; doubly oppressed 41; ethic of care thesis 42; feminine specificity 52; identity 57–8; justification 116–17; legal

and media portrayals 37–40; media narrative 39; men’s reaction to 44; oppression 41; performatives 57; prosecution narrative 9, 38–9; recuperation 38, 180n7; self-defence 38, 62–3, 64; as serial killer 39; speakable discourse 55–6; testimony of 30–1; unknowable other/performative self 63–6; victimization 30, 44–5 Young, Alison 11 Young, Iris Marion 36, 47, 49, 51

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