Explore the vast range of titles available.

Why are we so reluctant to believe that women can mean to kill? Based on case-studies from the US, UK and Australia, this book looks at the ways in which female killers are constructed in the media, in law and in feminist discourse almost invariably as victims rather than actors in the crimes they commit. Morrissey argues that by denying the possibility of female agency in crimes of torture, rape and murder, feminist theorists are, with the best of intentions, actually denying women the full freedom to be human. Case studies cover among others the battered wife, Pamela Sainsbury, who garrotted her husband as he slept, the serial killer, Aileen Wournos, who killed seven middle-aged men in Florida between 1989 and 1990, Tracey Wiggington, the so-called \"lesbian vampire killer\", and Karla Homolka who helped her husband kill two teenage girls in St. Catherines Ontario in 1993. 1. Traumatised Discourses: Narrations of Violent Female Subjectivities 2. Versions of the Self: Narrating the Subjectivities of Women Who Kill 3. Inconceivable Survivors: Battered Women Who Kill 4. Cultural Anxiety and Vampiric Voracity: Tracey Wigginton's 'Hunger' 5. Beyond Villainy: The 'Limit' Cases of Karla Homolka and Valmae Beck Conclusion: An Odyssey around Violent Female Subjects Bibliography

In May 1936, Abe Sada committed the most notorious crime in twentieth-century Japan—the murder and emasculation of her lover. What made her do it? And why was she found guilty of murder yet sentenced to only six years in prison? Why have this woman and her crime remained so famous for so long, and what does her fame have to say about attitudes toward sex and sexuality in modern Japan? Despite Abe Sada’s notoriety and the depictions of her in film and fiction (notably in the classic In the Realm of the Senses), until now, there have been no books written in English that examine her life and the forces that pushed her to commit the crime. Along with a detailed account of Sada’s personal history, the events leading up to the murder, and its aftermath, this book contains transcripts of the police interrogations after her arrest—one of the few existing first-person records of a woman who worked in the Japanese sex industry during the 1920s and 1930s—as well as a memoir by the judge and police records. Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star steps beyond the simplistic view of Abe Sada as a sexual deviate or hysterical woman to reveal a survivor of rape, a career as a geisha and a prostitute, and a prison sentence for murder. Sada endured discrimination and hounding by paparazzi until her disappearance in 1970. Her story illustrates a historical collision of social and sexual values—those of the samurai class and imported from Victorian Europe against those of urban and rural Japanese peasants.

In her study of anonymous infanticide news stories that appeared from 1822 to 1922 in the heart of the British Empire, in regional Leicester, and in the penal colony of Australia, Nicola Goc uses Critical Discourse Analysis to reveal both the broader patterns and the particular rhetorical strategies journalists used to report on young women who killed their babies. Her study takes Foucault's perspective that the production of knowledge, of 'facts' and truth claims, and the exercise of power, are inextricably connected to discourse. Newspaper discourses provide a way to investigate the discursive practices that brought the nineteenth-century infanticidal woman - known as ’the Infanticide’ - into being. The actions of the infanticidal mother were understood as a fundamental threat to society, not only because they subverted the ideal of Victorian womanhood but also because a woman's actions destroyed a man's lineage. For these reasons, Goc demonstrates, infanticide narratives were politicised in the press and woven into interconnected narratives about the regulation of women, women's rights, the family, the law, welfare, and medicine that dominated nineteenth-century discourse. For example, the Times used individual stories of infanticide to argue against the Bastardy Clause in the Poor Law that denied unmarried women and their children relief. Infanticide narratives often adopted the conventions of the courtroom drama, with the young transgressive female positioned against a body of male authoritarian figures, a juxtaposition that reinforced male authority over women. Alive to the marked differences between various types of newspapers, Goc's study offers a rich and nuanced discussion of the Victorian press's fascination with infanticide. At the same time, infanticide news stories shaped how women who killed their babies were known and understood in ways that pathologised their actions. This, in turn, influenced medical, judicial, and welfare policies regar

The essays in Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence find important connections in the ways that women are portrayed in relation to violence, whether they are murder victims or killers. The book's extensive cultural contexts acknowledge and engage with contemporary theories and practices of identity politics and debates about the ethics and politics of representation itself. Does representation produce or reproduce the conditions of violence? Is representation itself a form of violence? This book adds significant new dimensions to the characterization of gender and violence by discussing nationalism and war, feminist media, and the depiction of violence throughout society.

A young woman struggles against tradition and circumstance in this novel of love, class, and deceit from the author of Far from the Madding Crowd. Convinced that his impoverished family has noble connections, John Durbeyfield implores his daughter, Tess, to visit the wealthy Mrs. D'Urberville and claim kin. Reluctantly, Tess agrees, but when she falls prey to the manipulations of Alec D'Urberville, the widow's dissolute son, her search for love and happiness takes a disastrous turn. An earnest suitor named Angel Clare offers hope for salvation, but Tess must decide whether to confess her sins to the minister's son—or bury them forever.   First published in 1891, Tess of the D'Urbervilles scandalized Victorian readers with its frank depictions of female sexuality and its impassioned criticism of social conventions. Now widely recognized as Thomas Hardy's masterpiece, this tragic story of virtue destroyed is one of the most moving and unforgettable novels in English literature.   This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Murders by women were sensationalized in the English press during the 19th-century. Knelman analyses histories of different kinds of murder and explores how press representations of the murderess contributed to the Victorian construction of femininity.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a revolutionary period in the lives of women, and the shifting perceptions of women and their role in society were equally apparent in the courtroom.Women Who Kill Menexamines eighteen sensational cases of women on trial for murder from 1870 to 1958. The fascinating details of these murder trials, documented in court records and embellished newspaper coverage, mirrored the changing public image of women. Although murder was clearly outside the norm for standard female behavior, most women and their attorneys relied on gendered stereotypes and language to create their defense and sometimes to leverage their status in a patriarchal system. Those who could successfully dress and act the part of the victim were most often able to win the sympathies of the jury. Gender mattered. And though the norms shifted over time, the press, attorneys, and juries were all informed by contemporary gender stereotypes.

Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, as one judge described her, was \"a coldly calculated criminal recidivist and serial killer.\" She had experienced a lifetime of murder, mayhem, and mental illness.She killed two boyfriends, including one whose body was stuffed in a freezer.

On an August evening in 1933, in a quiet, working-class neighborhood in Paris, eighteen-year-old Violette Nozière gave her mother and father glasses of barbiturate-laced \"medication,\" which she told them had been prescribed by the family doctor; one of her parents died, the other barely survived. Almost immediately Violette's act of \"double parricide\" became the most sensational private crime of the French interwar era--discussed and debated so passionately that it was compared to the Dreyfus Affair. Why would the beloved only child of respectable parents do such a thing? To understand the motives behind this crime and the reasons for its extraordinary impact, Sarah Maza delves into the abundant case records, re-creating the daily existence of Parisians whose lives were touched by the affair. This compulsively readable book brilliantly evokes the texture of life in 1930s Paris. It also makes an important argument about French society and culture while proposing new understandings of crime and social class in the years before World War II.

Winner of the 2008 Outstanding Book Award by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Michelle Oberman and Cheryl L. Meyer don't write for news magazines or prime-time investigative television shows, but the stories they tell hold the same fascination. When Mothers Kill is compelling. In a clear, direct fashion the authors recount what they have learned from interviewing women imprisoned for killing their children. Readers will be shocked and outraged-as much by the violence the women have endured in their own lives as by the violence they engaged in-but they will also be informed and even enlightened. Oberman and Meyer are leading authorities on their subject. Their 2001 book, Mothers Who Kill Their Children, drew from hundreds of newspaper articles as well as from medical and social science journals to propose a comprehensive typology of maternal filicide. In that same year, driven by a desire to test their typology-and to better understand child-killing women not just as types but as individuals-Oberman and Meyer began interviewing women who had been incarcerated for the crime. After conducting lengthy, face-to-face interviews with forty prison inmates, they returned and selected eight women to speak with at even greater length. This new book begins with these stories, recounted in the matter-of-fact words of the inmates themselves. There are collective themes that emerge from these individual accounts, including histories of relentless interpersonal violence, troubled relationships with parents (particularly with mothers), twisted notions of romantic love, and deep conflicts about motherhood. These themes structure the books overall narrative, which also includes an insightful examination of the social and institutional systems that have failed these women. Neither the mothers nor the authors offer these stories as excuses for these crimes.