Monstrous semantics: The case of the criminal diaries
- Authors: Morrissey, Belinda
- Date: 2010
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Feminist Studies Vol. 25, no. 55 (2010), p. 295-311
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- Description: This article investigates the usage of a diary as a transparent truth device in legal proceedings. I argue that this usage assays a very naı¨ve notion, perpetrated by the prosecution, that truth is self-evident when written by the hand of the defendant. Moreover, and more importantly, this approach demands that words have only one meaning, that semantics and context don’t matter, and that broader, overarching themes are unimportant, even when only very brief quotations, selected out of eight years’ worth of entries are used. The diary, itself, is effectively prosecuted here; it becomes the ‘monstrous’ criminal, yet at all times, a mere synecdoche for the ‘real’ monster herself.
A palimpsest of abjection: Brendan Sokaluk and the burning of Churchill
- Authors: Morrissey, Belinda
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Southerly Vol. 72, no. 2 (2012), p. 100-117
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- Description: On Saturday, February 7 2009, Brendan Sokaluk took a short drive down a gravel road and, according to his testimony, flicked a lit ciga rette wrapped in a paper serviette out the window, thus igniting one of the most devastating of the many fires already burning on that dreadful day.
Impossible memory: traumatic narratives in Memento and Mullholland Drive
- Authors: Morrissey, Belinda
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Millennial Cinema:Memory in Global Film p.
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Dead ends : the vanishing of Marilyn Wallman
- Authors: Morrissey, Belinda , Davis, Kristen
- Date: 2021
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Crossroads of Rural Crime: Representations and Realities of Transgression in the Australian Countryside Chapter 7 p. 95-107
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- Description: This paper documents the case of a young girl who went missing from a country track in 1972. It considers the function of roads in her disappearance, and the importance and terror of roads generally in Australia. For roads have a role in Australia that is vastly different to smaller, more populous nations. Roads in Australia are absolutely crucial to the maintenance and sustenance of society. So too are the cars and other vehicles we use upon them, but they are just as paradoxical in their effects. As Elizabeth Jacka and Susan Dermody (1988, p. 113) put it so plainly: ‘our cars kill us, and without them we would die’. The case of the girl who vanished from a road is not an unusual event in Australia. However, it has led to a conjunction of long-lasting effects, particularly on the community of Mackay, that are. The case has never been solved, not due to a desire to solve it, but ironically because of the very methods initially employed to do so. © 2021 by Emerald Publishing Limited.
Sad, bad or mad : the denial of agency to women who kill
- Authors: Morrissey, Belinda
- Date: 2023
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women's Acts of Violence Chapter 23 p. 361-375
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- Description: 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.