- Title
- Sad, bad or mad : the denial of agency to women who kill
- Creator
- Morrissey, Belinda
- Date
- 2023
- Type
- Text; Book chapter
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/194638
- Identifier
- vital:18395
- Identifier
-
https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80382-255-620231024
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781803822556 (ISBN); 9781803822563 (ISBN)
- Abstract
- Murder is overwhelmingly a male affair (UNODC Global Study on Homicide, 2019). So, when women kill, their crimes gain a lot of attention and even more hysteria in both courts and media. This chapter will analyse the cases of Sally Challen, Belinda van Krevel and Maxine Carr to show that portrayals of women who are involved in killing exist on a continuum, from abused victims to those simply 'born evil' to the incomprehension of those whose crimes render them outside society altogether; or in simple terms, from sad, to bad, to mad. In all cases, the agency of the women is presented as incomplete or impossible, indicating our inability in heteropatriarchy to acknowledge that women are as capable as men of exhibiting the full spectrum of human behaviour. Denying agency, particularly to violent women, allows Western societies to avoid having to face and thus, attempt to understand, the female capacity for aggression. © 2023 Belinda Morrissey. All rights reserved.
- Publisher
- Emerald Group Publishing Ltd.
- Relation
- The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women's Acts of Violence Chapter 23 p. 361-375
- Rights
- All metadata describing materials held in, or linked to, the repository is freely available under a CC0 licence
- Rights
- Copyright © 2023 Belinda Morrissey
- Subject
- Abused victims; Agency; Evil women; Judicial opinions; Media representations; Women who kill
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