Moving Targets: Women, Murder, and RepresentationHelen Birch The rampaging female has become a new cliché in Hollywood cinema, a sexy beauty stabbing and shooting her way to box-office success. Fatal Attraction, Thelma and Louise, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Single White Female are a few of the recent mainstream films that have attracted huge audiences. Meanwhile, true accounts of a teenager shooting her lover's wife and a battered woman bludgeoning her husband to death get prime news media coverage—and are quickly made into TV movies. This pioneering collection of essays looks at our enduring fascination with women who murder. The authors explore how both fictional and real women are represented, as well as the way society responds to these women. The result is an often shocking picture of female violence that covers a vast territory: the Australian outback, a Florida highway, an Austrian hospital, a French village, and Hollywood. The women are as diverse as their settings: middle-class housewives, prostitutes, house maids, nurses, high-powered professionals. There is much here to provoke controversy. Society's uncertainty over the role of premenstrual syndrome, the fear of lesbianism, female violence as self-defense against patriarchy, and "appropriate" female behavior are issues that push buttons on several levels. Moving Targets is must-reading for anyone concerned with violence and representations of women in our culture. |
Contents
Myra Hindley and | 32 |
The case of Azaria | 62 |
The trials | 95 |
Hollywood | 127 |
The sexual politics of | 152 |
Justice for battered women | 172 |
Mothers who kill their children | 198 |
The Lainz Hospital murders | 218 |
An evolving criminality | 241 |
Notes | 269 |
Notes on contributors | 297 |
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abuse Alex anger appeared argued assistant nurse Australian Azaria Chamberlain baby Baldock battered women become behaviour Black Widow blood Blue Steel cent child Christine claimed committed convicted court crimes criminal justice daughter deadly dolls death defence diminished responsibility dingo doll films domestic evidence example fantasy Fatal Attraction fear February female serial killers femininity feminist filicide film noir films gender guilty Hindley's Home Office homicide hospital husband Ian Brady ibid imprisonment infanticide jury kill their children Kiranjit Lacan Lainz Lancelin Léa Leidolf lesbian Lindy Chamberlain London lover male manslaughter masculine Moors Murders mother motive Myra Hindley offenders Papin sisters patients person police prison provocation psychiatric rape relationship release reports self-defence sentenced serial killers serial murder sexual social suffering Susan tabloid Thelma and Louise Tracey Wigginton Tracey's trial vampire victims violence Wagner woman women kill women who kill Wuornos