AUTHOR: Author & academic; critical thinker; curmudgeon.
Posted on February 24, 2014
Knowing that my latest book is about murder and gender – or,
more specifically, about a particular narrative of modern identity and
individuality that has made possible the figure of the Western “recreational
murderer” – lots of people have drawn my attention to the recent case of Joanna
Dennehy.
Dennehy is a 32-year-old British woman who enlisted her
apparently enthralled male lovers, Gary Stretch and Leslie Layton, to be her
accomplices in the murders of three men, Lukasz Slaboszewski, Kevin Lee, and
John Chapman. (See here.) Dennehy’s documented taste for sadomasochistic sexual
practices (see here) has added to the frenzied media interest in the case, and
has led to the production of some dubious psychiatric diagnoses, which I plan to
write about elsewhere. Dennehy is both statistically unusual and discursively
rare in being described as a female recreational killer whose apparent motives
for committing her crimes were sexual sadism and thrill-seeking.
Yet, one Facebook interlocutor recently pointed out to me
that cases of women committing multiple killings similar to Dennehy’s –
typically “masculine crimes” – seem to be on the rise and are certainly in the
public eye at the moment. (The case of the “Craig’s List Killer”, 19-year-old
Miranda Barbour, springs immediately to mind.) While two do not a trend make,
it is interesting to wonder if the Zeitgeist is in some way enabling the
emergence of a new kind of female murderer. My approach to this problem, then,
is historically and culturally, rather than psychologically, oriented. (I am
not interested in individual psychological motivation, but in the
social-historical conditions that produce the figure of the murderer as
bizarrely aspirational, and that make it available to certain classes of
person, in certain situational contexts.)
In The Subject of Murder I argue that, in modern Western
culture, the murderer has the status of exceptional individual. This goes back
to the Romantic/ Decadent idea of the “artist-criminal”, in whom creativity and
destructivity are two sides of the same coin. Of course this idealized,
semi-fictional figure of potency is implicitly white and male (though his
sexual identity is often portrayed as fluid, alternating between heterosexual
hyper-masculinity and an ambivalent homoeroticism). Thomas De Quincey, Oscar
Wilde, and Jean Genet have all waxed lyrical about the genius-murderer and the
trope of murder-as-art in literary and aesthetic-philosophical writing.
In our contemporary culture, this grandiose murderous
exceptionality takes the form of celebrity, as David Schmid has compellingly
argued in his 2005 book, Natural Born Celebrities. “Murderer” is a celebrity
identity, as seen in the wealth of press attention that is brought to bear on
infamous killers, and the aura that accrues to people, and even to things,
close to those killers. The phenomenon of “murderabilia”, objects and artworks
created or previously owned by infamous killers that have a highly collectible
status, is one manifestation of this. The attention-seeking behaviour of many
serial killers reinforces their visibility. Many killers at large have sent
taunting letters to the police and press, such as David Berkowitz, the “Son of
Sam”, active in the USA in the 1970s. In other cases, such as that of the
Yorkshire Ripper (Peter Sutcliffe, in the UK), letters have been sent by others
pretending to be the murderer, increasing the visibility of the case and
speculation around the identity of the killer. And, tellingly, this was a trend
popularized by the first “celebrity serial killer” at the historical moment of
efflorescence of the popular press – the still-unidentified Victorian murderer, Jack the Ripper. (That
the mass press and the serial killer are products of the same age is far from a
coincidence.) Once caught and imprisoned, notorious killers can also keep up a
high media profile. “Moors Murderer” Ian Brady’s recent appeal to be
transferred from high security mental hospital to prison, his claim that he had
revealed the whereabouts of a victim’s body in a letter to his mental health
advocate, and his much discussed hunger strike, are good examples of this. (See
my post on Brady here.)
It will be noted that all of the names above are male. It is
not, of course, the case that there have historically been no female killers,
but media and culture have not tended to represent murderesses in the same
(ambivalently heroic) terms that they have used to represent men who kill – and
that men who kill can then take up as a badge of identity. Prominent female
killers of the past century have included Myra Hindley, Rosemary West, and
Aileen Wuornos, all of whom killed violently, and (in the cases of the first
two at least), for sexual motives. However, the first two names are notable for
being one half of celebrity murderous heterosexual couples (Myra and Ian; Rose
and Fred), and both women were vilified
in much stronger terms than their male partners, whose sexual violence was, in
each case, seen as an aberrant but intelligible extension of socially sanctioned
masculinity. Similarly, Wuornos, as that
very rare type of killer, a lesbian lone-wolf, stalking her male victims under
the guise of selling sexual services, attracted vitriol and hatred from press
and public, and an extremely harsh punishment relative to male perpetrators of
similar crimes. (She received multiple death sentences, despite the defense
presenting mitigating evidence of childhood sexual abuse, and mental illness.)
Some coverage of Joanna Dennehy’s case has discussed the difficulty society has
in accepting violent women, and has posited that Dennehy, as a sexually
adventurous, hedonistic spree-killer, presents particular problems to the codes
of representation that are available for describing women who kill. (Seeespecially Elizabeth Yardley’s intelligent commentary in The Guardian. Avoid
the comments if you wish to retain any sort of faith in the critical thinking
skills of the reading public.)
Can we really argue, then, that Joanne Dennehy is a
representative of a new type of female murderous subject, who employs the same
grandiose self-stylization and press attention-seeking tactics as her male
counterparts? There is certainly evidence that Dennehy boasted she was seeking
to become a “famous serial killer” at least two years before committing the
triple murder. (See here.) And, she described herself, while on the run, as
“Bonnie” of Bonnie and Clyde, suggesting strong identification with available
cultural representations of female criminality. (See here.) Like the Columbine killers, Eric Harris and
Dylan Klebold, who conceived their high-school shootings in advance as a media
spectacle, and like Stephen Griffiths, the Bradford “Crossbow Cannibal”, who
was a criminology student fascinated by the figure of the serial killer,
Dennehy was undoubtedly tapping into the same available cultural repository of
criminal myth-making as many male killers before her.
So where does Dennehy’s type of murderous subjectivity come
from? We might conclude by drawing a parallel with the ways in which what is
known as “raunch culture” has been embraced by some women as a (dubious) badge
of empowerment in a post-feminist age. This idea was introduced by Ariel Levy
in Female Chauvinist Pigs (2005). Levy argues that the rise of the FCP, who is
just as likely to appear in a strip club in the role of patron as of performer,
has contributed to the erasure of the feminist struggle and to making invisible
intersecting, class-based, power imbalances. Female Chauvinist Pig culture
co-opts a very narrow definition of “power”, based on aping valorized,
typically “masculine” behaviours and roles, and showing that (some) women can
access and benefit from those roles too. As Levy points out, these exceptional
women achieve their agency in contradistinction to, and at the expense of,
other “lesser” women, rather than by raising up the collectivity of women as a
group. Perhaps, by analogy, a form of violent, antisocial self-stylization is
becoming more available to those women who find themselves on the margins of
social acceptability, and who seek to make a name for themselves in a culture
obsessed with fame and exposure. It may be that the search for infamy offered
by the label of “serial killer” is increasingly the antisocial, shadow
alternative to seeking pop fame on The X Factor, or the hyper-visibility of
glamor-modeling, for socially disenfranchised women of the twenty-first
century, who see individualistic forms of male violence celebrated, and who
want a piece of that celebrity for themselves.
AUTHOR: “Prof. LD” is my blogular nickname. I am Lisa Downing, an author, sexuality studies scholar, critical thinker, and all-round curmudgeon. A few things I do like are feminism, fizz-drinking, Foucault, and foxes. Not necessarily in that order."
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