When Women Kill

Questions of Agency and Subjectivity

Belinda Morrissey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134510689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Why are we so reluctant to believe that women can mean to kill? Based on case-studies from the US, UK and Australia, this book looks at the ways in which female killers are constructed in the media, in law and in feminist discourse almost invariably as victims rather than 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. Case studies cover among others the battered wife, Pamela Sainsbury, who garrotted her husband as he slept, the serial killer, Aileen Wournos, who killed 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.

1 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• When women kill
• Transformations: Thinking through feminism
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Traumatized discourses: Narrating violence
• 2: Versions of the self: Narrating the subjectivities of women who kill
• 3: Inconceivable survivors: Battered women who kill
• 4: Cultural anxiety and vampiric voracity: Tracey wigginton’s ‘hunger’
• 5: Beyond villainy: The ‘limit’ cases of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck
• Conclusion: An odyssey around violent female subjects
• Notes
• Bibliography