Killing a “Monster”: Lisa Montgomery, Carceral Logics, and the Rhetoric of Sexual Trauma

Abstract

What happens when we treat sexual trauma as a disability? This article examines the federal execution case of Lisa Montgomery, who murdered Bobbie Jo Stinnett and kidnapped her baby, with this question as its motivation. Prior to execution, dozens of clemency petitions circulated publicly, revealing how Montgomery was repeatedly subjected to instances of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse across her lifetime, generating robust commentary about mental disability and sexual violence. I argue that these petitions—even in their effort to retrain public opinion of how Montgomery’s history shaped her actions—upheld carceral logics that insisted Montgomery must pay for her bodymind, reinforcing the idea that mentally ill women do not belong in the public sphere. By carving critical space for sexual violence within feminist disability studies, this article demonstrates how the tensions that ensue when categorizing the aftermath of sexual trauma as a disability result from a discursive incapacity of the state.