Women Murder and Representation

Moving Targets: women, murder and representation

Journal of Gender Studies July 1995

BYLINE: Storr, Merl

SECTION: Vol. 4, No. 2; Pg. 232-3; ISSN: 0958-9236

LENGTH: 573 words

HIGHLIGHT:

Collection of essays focuses on media perceptions of women murderers

Helen Birch, Ed. 1994

Berkeley, University of California Press

302 pp., 0-520-08574-4, pb $15.00

This lively collection, originally published by Virago in 1993, is about women who kill: the women themselves and, more centrally -- the sense -- or, not infrequently, nonsense -- that is made of such women within contemporary Western cultures. As Helen Birch's excellent introduction to the volume points out, women currently make up a small minority of suspected or convicted murderers, but in recent years the literal female fatale has attracted media and cultural interest wildly out of proportion to actual crime statistics -- from the Alien trilogy to Basic Instinct, from Myra Hindley's life sentence to Aileen Wuornos' death sentence, from provocation to PMT. The concern of this collection is to examine the ways in which women who kill become 'moving targets' of representation, shifting between discourses of woman-as-victim and woman-as-monster.

The essays accordingly set about investigating some of the heavily coded representations of real-life and fictional female killers in arts, media and culture.

Contributors engage with a wide range of cases, both contemporary and historical, from Western Europe, North America and Australasia, including a French cultural obsession with a 1930s case of female double murder, the British cultural obsession with Myra Hindley, legal definitions of murderand feminist law reform campaigns, and media, especially news media, representations of real-life murder cases, including the truly bizarre Australian case of a young woman accused of murder in court and of being a lesbian vampire (yes, really) in the popular press. However, as contributors point out, the appropriation of female murderers for ideological ends is by no means exclusive to sensationalized press reporting: feminist commentators have also provided simplistic and sometimes romanticized constructions of violent women as heroines in struggle against patriarchy or as the proto-feminist worm that turns. Indeed, just a few months after the first publication of this very collection, the now-defunct magazine Lesbian London published an article straightforwardly lamenting the fact that Aileen Wuornos had not become a 'lesbian heroine'.

Being familiar with this collection from its