Murderesses, monsters and madwomen: gender performance and the assessment of queer culpability in the Australian legal imagining

Abstract

ABSTRACT The socio-legal tendency to categorise female killers as either ‘mad’, ‘sad’ ‘bad’ has been recognised as reflective of narrow notions of women’s capacity for violence. If women only kill due to insanity, or as the result of prior victimisation (the ‘mad’ and ‘sad’), then those who fall outside this narrative (the ‘bad’) risk legal and popular characterisation as non-women and even non-human. I consider the role of gender performance in which of these narratives are imposed upon a defendant and suggest that queer women are particularly susceptible to framing as monstrous due to their transgression of gender norms. This article will focus on the murders of Edward Baldock and Stacey Mitchell, both killed by lesbian couples in Australia in 1989 and 2006 respectively. Despite the intervening years, the defendants in both were characterised as vampiric in court and the news media, to the exclusion of relevant evidence of mental illness. I will examine this discursive and textual construction of the lesbian offender through Julie Kristeva’s theory of abjection and explore how the creation of a legal monster justifies, and indeed necessitates, its expulsion from society, leading to harsher punishment for lesbian defendants.