Wuornos Research Articles

“You’ll never meet someone like me again”: Patty Jenkins’s Monster as Rogue Cinema

Film is a powerful medium that can influence audience’s perceptions, values and ideals. As filmmaking evolved into a serious art form, it became a powerful tool for telling stories that require us to re-examine our ideology. While it remains popular to adapt a literary novel or text for the screen, filmmakers have more freedom to pick and choose the stories they want to tell. This freedom allows filmmakers to explore narratives that might otherwise go unheard, which include stories that feature marginal figures, such as serial killers, as sympathetic protagonists, which is what director Patty Jenkins achieves in her 2003 film Monster. Charlize Theron’s transformation into and performance as Aileen Wuornos, and Jenkins’s presentation of the subject matter, make this film an example of rogue cinema. In addition, Aileen Wuornos is portrayed as a clear example of the rogue character. This character trope frequently defies social standards, suffers from past trauma, is psychologically complex, and is often exiled. As a prostitute and social outcast, Aileen Wuornos exists on the fringes of society and rejects the hegemonic power structure and later heteronormativity of society, which makes her a rogue figure. While there are several aspects to consider when analyzing Jenkins’s film, my intention is to argue that this film is an example of rogue cinema because of its content. In order to accomplish this task, I examine Theron’s bodily transformation and her performance as Wuornos. Furthermore, I look at how Jenkins handles the depiction of romantic love and gendered violence and argue that her treatment of this content renders this film rogue.

“A Flower in a Hard Rain”: Melodramatic Storytelling by, and About, Aileen Wuornos

In one of her prison letters to childhood friend, Dawn Botkins, Aileen Wuornos feigns resignation about both her impending execution and her legacy. “Like a flower in a hard rain,” she claims, “I’ll let things go.” In fact, “letting go” of her story—at least those parts of it for which others clearly hungered—was something Wuornos ultimately would not or could not do. Instead of illumination, Wuornos’s letters feature an emotionally charged pattern that has been identified as “externalization,” wherein attentive members of her audience are fervently embraced only to be violently castigated. Ultimately unable to control the direction her story would take, Wuornos elected never to share it at all. Yet the heated “externalization” experts have attributed to her personality has been strangely mirrored in the ways commentators about Wuornos have approached one another.

Easy Living

Easy Living Cally Fiedorek (bio) I live in the clouds, in a beautiful apartment made of glass, in New York City. My husband is a tall, wise, epically handsome, highly successful man. My good fortune humbles me. I get tired of the things I say to him, though, and how I say them. "Might go to the gym," I say. "Might pick up some vino." Tonight he came home with terrible news. His ex-wife — they were only briefly married — was killed this morning. She was one of these out-there types. A photojournalist, quite well regarded, with the Associated Press. Her colleagues don't yet know exactly how it happened. She was covering a drug-related skirmish in the Sinaloa highlands, in northwest Mexico. They know she's dead. Dead! As dead as anyone. Any dead person. In any case, she and my husband were married for several months when he was twenty-nine, almost ten years ago. There was no unfinished business. If there was, and I didn't know about it, it's finished now. [End Page 78] In our kitchen, scraping dinner from our plates, I think of her. Her hair, her hips he handled. Lips he kissed — all alone now in the hot dark of a morgue in Mexicali. Weird! ________ One thing to know: I've heard myself described as a "solid nine," which, from time to time, out to dinner, when I catch myself, full-length, in the dim jewel of a brasserie's artfully distressed bathroom mirror, strikes me as actually low, and unkind. Now, I'm not one of these wash-and-go types. I do require some overhead. My husband wonders what I'm doing in the can for hours. I tell him, Honey, I'm making magic happen. My forehead, I've noticed, at a certain angle, has a slightly upper-penile (lower-penile?) ridge to it. In the final analysis — I've gone back and forth on this a bunch — bangs are my friend. My eyebrows must be penciled in in quite an exacting way, like very lightly italicized commas, or they tend to disappoint the Vitruvian good sense of my features. Twice daily I'll use a product called Sel de la Pêche Lash-Amplifying Complex II, which comes in a teenyweeny, ninety-dollar tube, and though it smells and feels a lot like Vaseline is actually filled with things called "deep-sea microcrystals." I think it's working. But my tits. My tits, since the milk came in, are extremely gloopy. There are days, finally, when I'm horrific: I call this my Aileen Wuornos look, when I very closely resemble the notorious serial highway mankiller Aileen Wuornos. Leaving the bathroom I see my husband recoil for half a second at today's lipstick choice — an on-trend fuchsia — the dumb Kabuki of it. As if to say … but someone's died. [End Page 79] ________ There's a picture of his ex-wife standing in the desert, in the evening, no makeup and no bra, and it's as candid as if God Himself took it. Even the mule looks just right. Looks jaunty. Several bearded, hunky men flank her. A few of them I've since met, friends of my husband's — reporters and aid workers, their roving fraternity — whose bonds were forged on the front lines and in hellish cantinas. (All of this from his first career as an NGO operative, which I'm not sure what that is exactly.) My husband's there, to her immediate left. He looks unbelievable — Hemingwayesque — wry and strong and in his prime, paused midsentence on the edge of an important thought, and there is something in this picture, in the freedom with which they all wear themselves, that hurts and haunts me slightly. Looking at it, you can feel the loss. Not just of her — of youth. In one of the better photos I have of me and him, he looks annoyed, I look like Kelly Ripa, clenching pearl-white teeth, and you can see the blurred fingertip of an inconvenienced maître d'. ________ "Simon called," my husband says. "He wants me to maybe...

The Murderer Within

Lisa Downing, The Subject, of Murder, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013, 241pp To be honest, the title of Lisa Downing's latest book: The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality and the Modern Killer, didn't immediately inspire me. Here we go again, I thought, with yet another study on the extraordinary otherness of those who kill. This book might provide a different taxonomy, or it might consider why murderers are seen to be exceptional, or it might explain from where the idea of the exceptionality of the killer has developed in the modern West. However, I feared it would be less likely to debunk the whole 'exceptionality thesis' once and for all, which is the only perspective on murder and murderers that I'm still interested in after studying the phenomenon for the past 15 years. How very wrong I turned out to be. Lisa Downing provides a much needed corrective to a great deal of thinking about murder and the murderous in this fascinating, thoughtfully written survey of the various understandings of murderers from the birth of modernity to the present day. The book does not function to merely catalogue cases and attach them to concepts of the 'murderer' in vogue at the time they occurred. Instead, she catalogues the prime theories of the murderer, locates them within their milieu, and then shows, using a few well-chosen case studies, how these ideas continue to infect and inflect our contemporary theories of who murderers are and how and why they function. In a sense, she's developed a concept of the 'murderer-function' in modern society in much the same way that Michel Foucault developed the 'author-function' in his archaeology of the context of authorship in 'What is an Author?'. Developing her study chronologically, Downing starts her explication of the 'murderer-function' with a comprehensive sweep of the historic theories of the murderer. These include the murderer-as-artist, the murderer as superman, and the murderer as beast. So far, we are on familiar ground, following the concept of the murderer in Romantic and Decadent guise as a male subject desirous of ultimate omnipotence over life and death; to the Nietzschean version of the man so special that ordinary morality could never be considered to apply to him; and finally reaching the nadir of the inborn degenerate pervert who kills because he cannot control his lust. Please note my deliberate use of the male pronoun throughout: murderers in history are typically gendered male. The most important thing none of these 'exceptional' examples do, according to Downing, is to suggest that murder could ever be in any way normal, and certainly not that murderers could also be ordinary human beings capable of change. For, to make this argument is to challenge the concept of heteronormative culture which resolutely insists, not only that murderers are different to the rest of 'us', but that to become one is to remove oneself from 'society' and the 'civilized' altogether. The other thing the 'exceptional' murderer thesis states is that women and children are both incomprehensible, and thus completely inhuman, when they kill. There is no language to 'speak' the female killer or the child who kills. We lack discourse to surround these killers with ready-made philosophies, motives and subjectivities when they forcibly put on the mantle of murderer. As Downing shows, old subject positions of 'murderer' don't fit these very different killers and this is why we struggle so exhaustively to either exonerate or eliminate them within communal fantasies of meaning-making. Using a traditional Foucauldian discourse analysis methodology, Downing proceeds to analyse her seven case studies, which cover murderers of all kinds and from all walks of life. These include: artist-murderer Pierre-Francois Lacenaire; poisoner Marie Lafarge; lust murderers Jack the Ripper and followers; partner murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady; gay serial killer Dennis Nilsen; lesbian, prostitute serial killer Aileen Wuornos; and children who kill, including the murderers of James Bulger, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson; Mary Bell; and the Columbine school shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. …

The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer by Lisa Downing (review)

Reviewed by: The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer by Lisa Downing Elizabeth Carroll Downing, Lisa. The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. 241. isbn: 0-226-00354-x In a thought-provoking book, The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer, Lisa Downing takes a topic normally reserved for courtrooms, television crime series, and supermarket tabloids, and forces scholars to consider serial murderers according to new historical and artistic perspectives. Downing articulates the ways in which modern serial killers become celebrities and exceptional human beings in the eyes of the public and press, and analyzes the social and cultural purposes their exceptionality serves. Downing pays particular attention to the ways in which gender determines our reaction to murderers. Finally, she considers the role the arts—fictional and non-fictional texts, documentaries, feature-length films, drawings, and paintings—either produced by the killers themselves or other people, play in construction of the “subject” murder. Notably absent from her book, however, is the media sensationalism that often accompanies modern serial killers’ cases. The Subject of Murder is thus unique among studies of modern serial killers. Previous scholars have alternatively focused on European discourses about the murderer-cum-artist, or used criminology and sexology to pathologize serial killers. Downing combines these two approaches to provide a fresh look at the subject of murder across a broad historical period. The first chapter of the study [End Page 282] provides an overview of the rise of the modern killer beginning in the late-eighteenth century with the Marquis de Sade, in the nineteenth century with the works of Cesare Lombroso and Richard von Krafft-Ebing regarding the science and psychology of the modern murderer, and continuing in the twentieth century with Michel Foucault. For each serial killer studied (see the chapter descriptions below), Downing then gives a close reading of the primary texts associated with the case—writings, testimonies, art pieces, court proceedings, etc. Finally, Downing analyzes each incident from a feminist perspective since, as she argues, it is rare to find discussions, scholarly or otherwise, in which a female murderer’s penchant for crime is not attributed to failed femininity. Each of the book’s seven chapters is devoted to one serial killer. The three nineteenth-century murders she discusses are France’s Pierre-François Lacenaire and Marie Lafarge, and England’s Jack the Ripper. For the twentieth century Downing considers British killers Myra Hindley and Dennis Nilsen, and American serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Selecting equal numbers of adult male and female serial killers allows Downing to deconstruct both masculinity and femininity. The final chapter is devoted to children who kill: Mary Bell, Jon Venables, and Robert Thompson from Britain, and the Columbine Shooters from the United States. In the chapter on children who kill, Downing finds that our shock at their crimes is attributed to the fact that children are deemed innocent and pure, and to kill goes against the very nature of childhood. Similarly, female serial killers are particularly aberrant because they behave in unnatural (i.e. unfeminine) ways. Although male serial killers are also reviled by the public, since the nineteenth century they have been met with a fascination and even an awe that dates back to the Romantic ideal of the exceptional human being. Downing ultimately demonstrates that modern serial killers are not exceptional subjects; they are products and producers of modern society. The chapters on Lacenaire and Jack the Ripper should prove particularly useful for nineteenth-century scholars since they were cult figures for Romantic and Republican writers such as Pétrus Borel, Alexandre Dumas, Gérard de Nerval, and Théophile Gautier. Lacenaire embodied the Baudelairian trope that man is simultaneously drawn to good and evil. These writers and artists lauded the killer for his exceptional status and his ability to create art through death. It is therefore not surprising that they and others, such as Victor Hugo, featured the celebrated criminal in their works. Hugo’s Le Dernier jour d’un condamné and Gautier’s “Étude de mains: Lacenaire” are two such examples. The self-proclaimed anti-feminist writer...

Queer Justice: The Retrials of Leopold and Loeb

Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the ways in which homosexuality is constructed in the homophobic imagination as dangerous and deadly. Indeed, anti-gay rhetoric positions homosexuality not as a sexual orientation or even a lifestyle, but as a deathstyle.1 The homosexual is seen as a sinister threat? to individual health (Sontag), to families and children (Edelman), to the bonds of community (Bersani), and to the strength of the nation (Miller). This often implies actual violence, realized in its extreme form as murder, and the fantasy of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender has proved remarkably enduring. Seen in plays and movies over the past century, the murderous character conflates sexual deviance with criminal deviance, creating a villain who serves to vilify all people. LGBT activists have often made headlines by protesting such characters, appearing in films ranging from Cruising (1980) and Basic Instinct (1992) to Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives (2010). Founded in 1985, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) functions as a watchdog against such negative representations in news and entertainment media. While the queer killer may be a homophobic construction, there are, of course, actual gay and lesbian people who do commit murder, and the representations of these real people raise more complex problems about villainy. Anti-gay organizations are fond of pointing to murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Andrew Cunanan, and Aileen Wuornos as proof of the evil of homosexuality, which then becomes evidence in the argument to deny civil rights to LGBT people. For example, the anti-gay Family Research Institute publishes the writings of Paul Cameron, who directly links the gory details of Jeffrey Dahmer 's cannibalism to a substantial minority of gay men and lesbians who practice violent sex as well as the reportedly high rate of suicide among gays and lesbians. The conclusion to be drawn from these tenuously connected assertions: most violence involving gays is self-induced, and therefore hate crimes legislation should not be passed.3 The imagined link between homosexuality and murder is so strong that even when murderers are not known to be gay, the tabloid media sell the fantasy that they are. Soon after the 2002 capture of John Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, known as the Beltway Snipers, The National Enquirer ran a picture of the two men smiling and with their arms around each other and the headline: Snipers: Their Gay Life? & Why It Made Them Kill. (34-37). Similarly, after the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, The Globe exposed the Seung-Hui Cho's Secret Gay Life: What REALLY Drove Him to Kill. These tabloid stories are largely devoid of reliable facts about the murderer's sexuality; rather, the evidence is constructed to fit neatly into the readymade template that positions homosexuality as the cause of murder and the homosexual as pathologically driven to murder. When the trope is extended to mass murderers like Adolf Hitler and Mohamed Atta, homosexuality is constructed not just as a threat against individual lives, but against civilization itself.4 Interpretations of villainy are further complicated when real killers become the basis for characters in fictional narratives. Dahmer, Cunanan, and Wuornos have all been recreated as characters in movies, plays, and musicals, often written by openly gay and lesbian writers, and presented to gay and gay-friendly audiences. These fictionalized representations of killers should not be automatically dismissed or condemned as negative representations. Dramatic narratives about real killers have the potential to create more complex responses and interpretations, interrogating and possibly even combating the homophobia promoted by anti-gay organizations and the tabloid media. Plays and films can create new narratives that wrest the out of the hands of the homophobes and allow for different meanings to emerge. …

True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity , and: Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (review)

Reviewed by: True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity, and: Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture Geoff Hamilton Mark Seltzer. True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2007. 288 pp. David Schmid. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Violent criminality, now more than ever, occupies a weirdly central and centralizing place in American cultural life. Blockbuster media—from cable news reports on school shootings, serial slaughters, and husbands-gone-wild, to the endlessly proliferating crime narratives that appear now on everything from Spike TV to the National Geographic Network to the Women’s Entertainment channel—bring mass audiences together in consideration of trauma and outrage. World War II press reports apparently coined the term “blockbuster bomb” for a device explosive enough to destroy whole neighbourhoods. Contemporary blockbusters, some of which you may take home from your local Blockbuster, offer a related sort of communal participation in annihilation and suffering, however vicarious. It is the public and public-making aspects of criminality, the criminal’s fame and the crime’s socializing function, that concern David Schmid in Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture and Mark Seltzer in True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. The authors join here a lively conversation about the cultural significance of violent transgression, drawing on and augmenting such important works as Joel Black’s Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (1991), Philip Jenkins’s Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide (1994), Karen Haltunnen’s Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (1998), Seltzer’s own Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (1998), and Philip L. Simpson’s Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction (2000). [End Page 279] For several decades now, the figure of the serial killer has been exceptionally prominent in American culture, with real and fictional examples—Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Hannibal Lecter, Aileen Wuornos, BTK, et al.—achieving a level of name recognition and “brand” prominence to be envied by any Hollywood actor. As David Schmid contends in his excellent study, a pop-cultural environment largely indifferent to moral value as a condition of fame has transformed the serial killer into both the “ultimate deviant” (25), the worst sort of human one can imagine, and also the “exemplary modern celebrity” (4), an individual revered for being so horrible. The how and why of the serial killer’s amoral ascendance is explored thoroughly and convincingly by Schmid. His opening section deals, first, with the suggestively proleptic celebrity of two nineteenth-century serial killers, Jack the Ripper and H.H. Holmes, who prompted powerful public revulsion and fascination, thus “inaugurat[ing] the ongoing debate about whether famous serial killers are the consummate insiders or outsiders of American culture” (33) (the Ripper’s putative “Americanness,” see below, is discussed in detail). He then moves on to examine the history of the FBI’s relationship to serial killing, revealing how this organization “claim[ed] exclusive ownership of serial murder” and “[used] popular culture to both publicize and reinforce its reputation as the unquestioned source of expertise on serial crime” (67). From here, Schmid proceeds to his second section, investigating serial killers in Hollywood films, television crime dramas, and true-crime narratives. An epilogue considers the status of the serial killer after 9/11, with Schmid tracking its overlap with concerns about terrorism and concluding that the serial-killer figure has endured because of its oddly reassuring familiarity and usefulness in framing a more recent and still poorly understood menace. One of Schmid’s central arguments—cogently defended over the course of the book—is that the serial killer’s ascendance has been made possible by the myriad ways in which this particular sort of criminal can be exploited by diverse ideological agendas and commercial interests. Among the parties who have found serial killers expedient during the last three decades are the FBI (which needed to posit a threat large enough to justify its own expansion), tabloid news (which sought lurid content in order to compete for the attention of an increasingly fragmented...

Public executions: the death penalty and the media

The death penalty is one of the country's most controversial issues. The fairness of its application is debated in coffeehouses, classrooms, political arenas, and the media. However, despite its representation in the media, most death cases receive surprisingly little national media attention. In fact, of the 1000 people executed in the United States since 1977, and the 3,500 inmates currently awaiting execution, only a handful of cases can be recalled by the public. Those that are memorable are so because only a few are dramatically represented in the media. Why is it that those that receive the most serious penalty are virtually nameless, while the death penalty in general is one of the most discussed aspects of the criminal justice system? What makes some executions more newsworthy than others? What are the implications of this coverage for the public's understanding of this significant issue? This book looks at those death row cases that received the most intensive media coverage from the 1970s through the present, and why. At the same time, it focuses on changes in public opinion about the death penalty and how newspaper coverage and evolving mass sentiment relate to one another. Kudlac covers such celebrated cases as Karla Faye Tucker, Timothy McVeigh, Aileen Wuornos, John Wayne Gacy, and others that captured the attention of the American public and affected public opinion about the death penalty through the help of the media. He considers issues such as religion, politics, race, gender, and class as he reveals the reasons for our attention to certain cases above others. The book concludes with a consideration of where we go from here. With new investigative techniques that have helped to exonerate some death row inmates, and various other considerations that have come into play in recent cases, the future of the death penalty will continue to be shaped by the media and the public.

The Trouble with Aileen Wuornos, Feminism's “First Serial Killer”

Lesbian prostitute Aileen Wuornos was popularly termed “America's first female serial killer.” Between 1989 and 1990, she killed six men, later testifying they had raped or attempted to rape her. By analyzing media coverage of Wuornos’ story, I argue that Wuornos’ incommensurability with available stories of women who kill illustrates the need to expand the rhetorical resources that make female violence and victimage intelligible. After demonstrating that Wuornos’ gender transgressions were disciplined into intelligible terms by understandings of criminality as an already spatial and gendered category, I conclude by discussing the “trouble” Wuornos poses to feminist and queer cultural politics.

From documentary to drama: capturing Aileen Wuornos

This essay explores the cross-promotion between Nick Broomfield's documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (UK, 2003) and Patty Jenkins' independent feature film Monster (USA, 2003), both of which profess to offer the ‘real’ story of Aileen Wuornos, the woman called America's ‘first female serial killer’. The debate among critics about whether it is the documentary or the drama that has the most to offer is staged as a contest between reality and fiction. A close examination of this debate, however, reveals the extent to which the categories of reality and fiction are in fact interwoven, with interpretation of both films reliant not only on how they relate to actuality but how they relate to each other. This essay considers how the two films trade in images of Wuornos as monstrous other, and how that trade is revealing about the perceived status and relationship between documentary and dramatizations of real life and the kind of work these forms of fact-based representation are seen to perform in public culture. Of particular interest is the tension between reality and performance, as revealed through the media focus on the actress Charlize Theron's transformation into Wuornos in Monster.

Natural born celebrities: serial killers in American culture

Jeffrey Dahmer. Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Over the past thirty years, serial killers have become iconic figures in America, the subject of made-for-TV movies and mass-market paperbacks alike. But why do we find such luridly transgressive and horrific individuals so fascinating? What compels us to look more closely at these figures when we really want to look away? Natural Born Celebrities considers how serial killers have become lionized in American culture and explores the consequences of their fame. David Schmid provides a historical account of how serial killers became famous and how that fame has been used in popular media and the corridors of the FBI alike. Ranging from H. H. Holmes, whose killing spree during the 1893 Chicago World's Fair inspired The Devil in the White City, right up to Aileen Wuornos, the lesbian prostitute whose vicious murder of seven men would serve as the basis for the hit film Monster, Schmid unveils a new understanding of serial killers by emphasizing both the social dimensions of their crimes and their susceptibility to multiple interpretations and uses. He also explores why serial killers have become endemic in popular culture, from their depiction in The Silence of the Lambs and The X-Files to their becoming the stuff of trading cards and even Web sites where you can buy their hair and nail clippings. Bringing his fascinating history right up to the present, Schmid ultimately argues that America needs the perversely familiar figure of the serial killer now more than ever to manage the fear posed by Osama bin Laden since September 11. This is a persuasively argued, meticulously researched, and compelling examination of the media phenomenon of the 'celebrity criminal' in American culture. It is highly readable as well. Joyce Carol Oates

The Role of Psychopathy and Sexuality in a Female Serial Killer

The case of Aileen Wuornos, executed in Florida for the serial killing of seven men, is studied to determine her degree of psychopathy and the presence or absence of sexuality or sexual sadism as a motivation or gratification for her crimes. The authors, one of whom evaluated the subject shortly before her death, determined that she evidenced a psychopathic personality (PCL-R score 32). She also met DSM-IV-TR criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder. While her killings ostensibly were carried out during routine acts of prostitution, there was ambiguous evidence that her crimes were sexually motivated or gratifying. Her articulated motivation was robbery and elimination of the witness/victim. After carefully considering all available data, the authors concluded there was no convincing evidence of sexual sadism in either her personal history or her method of committing serial murder, and it remains unclear whether sexual gratification was to some degree a motivating factor in her commission of these offenses. The confluence of early childhood attachment disruptions, severe psychopathy, other personality disorder pathology, and a traumagenic abuse history likely contributed to her having serially murdered seven victims.

Corporal Evidence

Millie Wilson, in her installation Not a Serial Killer (1994), and Tammy Rae Carland, in her video Lady Outlaws and Faggot Wannabes (1995), critically examine media representations of Aileen Wuornos. Wuornos, who has been classified as the “first woman serial killer” by the FBI, has been on death row in Florida since her 1992 trial.1 Now aged 39, Wuornos had been a sex worker for most of the seventeen years preceding her arrest in January 1991. Convicted of killing seven men, she testified that she had armed herself with a gun when soliciting clients in response to increasing levels of violence.2 Wuornos has consistently affirmed the right to self-defense: “I'm supposed to die because I'm a prostitute? No, I don't think so.

Corporal Evidence: Representations of Aileen Wuornos

Corporal Evidence: Representations of Aileen Wuornos

Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer

Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer

Fatal women: lesbian sexuality and the mark of aggression

In this major contribution to lesbian theory/cultural studies, Lynda Hart analyzes the way violent women have been represented in literature, plays, film, and performance. Starting from the historical link between criminality and sexual deviancy, Hart builds a complex and original theory in which the shadow of the lesbian animates representations of violent women from the Victorian novel to the recent proliferation of films depicting women who kill. This cross-disciplinary study critiques constructions of gender, race, class, sexualities, and the cultural politics of the 1990s in one of the first book-length contributions to lesbian theory. Fatal Women is certain to be read widely by scholars, students, and anyone interested in the politics of representation.Hart's introductory chapter constructs a theory of violence across the discourses of sexology, criminology, and psychoanalysis. Subsequent chapters detail this theory in the Victorian novel and stage sensation Lady Audley's Secret, Frank Wedekind's Lulu Plays, which introduced the invert onto the European stage, the popular films Thelma and Louise, Mortal Thoughts, and Basic Instinct, the political intersection of race and gender in Single White Female, the performance art of Karen Finley in the context of the censorship debates, the fate of Aileen Wuornos, dubbed the first female serial killer by the FBI, and the Split Britches' performance Lesbians Who Kill.