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...manifests in the media coverage of cases of infanticide. This paper aims to begin to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the roles of race and culture, class, marital status, and biology in the media's treatment of two infanticidal women, Khoua Her and Andrea Yates. On September 3, 1998, in St. Paul, Minnesota, Khoua Her, Hmong immigrant who had been living in the United States for several years, (2) strangled her six children and attempted suicide before calling 911 to report the incident. (3) At the time of the strangling, Her was a twenty-four-year-old working mother estranged from her husband. (4) She was ultimately sentenced to fifty years imprisonment under the terms of a plea bargain that required her to plead guilty to six counts of intentional second-degree murder for the killing of her children. (5) On June 20, 2001, in Clear Lake, Texas, Yates, a thirty-six-year-old white, middle-class, fundamentalist Christian homemaker in a traditional marriage, drowned her five children in the bath tub before calling 911 and her husband to report her actions. On August 8, 2001, Yates pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to two charges of capital murder for the deaths of two of her sons and her daughter. (6) To support the insanity plea, Yates's lawyers claimed that she was suffering from postpartum depression at the time of the murders. (7) She was determined competent to stand trial, (8) and on March 12, 2002 was found guilty of the two capital murder charges. (9) Three days later, on March 15, the jury deliberated for approximately 35 minutes before recommending a sentence of life in prison instead of the death penalty, (10) and Yates was formally sentenced on March 18, 2002. (11) Yates will be eligible for parole in 2041, (12) and her lawyers have submitted notice of appeal. (13) Both the reduction in penalty and the lodging of the appeal are indicative of a general belief that Yates deserves some degree of leniency in the punishment of her crimes.
Apart from the formal legal process, both women's acts have been subject to a precursory "trial by media." This article will trace the different explanatory narratives that emerge in these media trials, with some brief analysis of the post-verdict media treatment to which Yates has been subject. Part II will discuss what constitutes "valued motherhood" in this discourse, and trace the respective "worth" of the mothering done by Her and Yates as it is presented in the media accounts of their crimes. Part III will outline the deployment of images of "mad" and "bad" mothers in infanticide cases, and describe how the image of a "mad" mother is more readily mobilized by the media to explain the actions of white mothers who kill, than those of poor women of color. Finally, Part IV will consider the social, legal, and political functions served by labeling white women "mad" and women of color "bad" in the treatment of infanticidal women. In undertaking such an analysis, this article follows the line of a number of postmodern accounts of motherhood and crime which highlight how society generally delivers more punitive treatment to those women who do not meet the ideal norms of motherhood, including poor women of color. (14) However, by focusing on how this pattern of treatment plays out in the media in the context of infanticide, where technically all of the offenders have drastically failed to meet the ideal maternal myth because they have killed their children and therefore theoretically should all be subject to similar levels of punitive treatment because they are equally "bad," it is hoped that the race/culture/class bases for disparate treatment will be brought into even sharper relief.
II. THE MYTH OF MOTHERHOOD
A. Some Moms Are Better Than Others
It is axiomatic that when a mother kills her child(ren) she offends societal myths of maternal grace and "mother love." (15) This inability to reconcile infanticide with images of motherhood is a common theme of newspaper coverage of infanticidal women. (16) Such comments tend to associate motherhood with love ("loving mothers don't take the lives of their own children") (17) and acts with inherent character ("Ms. Yates's act was not a mere variant of maternal behavior; she was nature's aberration") (18) with unquestioning ease. The result of these two elisions is that the act of killing one's child is considered so antithetical to the behavioral norms of motherhood as to justify the "demotion" of status from "mother" to the prematernal state of "woman." For example, one newspaper reader in arguing that Yates should never be released prefaced his comments with a reference to Yates as "[t]he woman (not a 'mother,' by my reckoning)[.]" (19)
However, the fall from maternal grace is not the same for all infanticidal mothers. This disparate treatment of women in infanticide cases has been well noted. (20) The disparate treatment has been primarily attributed to whether the mother is classified as "mad" (resulting in more lenient treatment) or "bad" (resulting in harsher treatment). (21) However, it is necessary to go back a step in this analysis, and ask whether the "mad" or "bad" account of criminal mothers is mobilized more readily with respect to some mothers than others, in order to more closely examine the role of the media in mobilizing these images. A useful starting point for this exercise is a general recognition that not all criminal mothers are subject to the same treatment by the criminal justice system or media. Instead, more punitive treatment is delivered to those women who do not meet the ideal norms of "motherhood." (22)
This disparate coverage and treatment of criminal mothers stems from the fact that the concept of "motherhood" is neither innocuous nor universal, but pretends to be both. Motherhood is not innocuous, as it is given meaning by the core features of patriarchal ideology. (23) It is not universal, because there are essentially three main variables which determine the value that attaches to motherhood: race, (24) class, (25) and the role that the father has in relation to both the child(ran) and mother. (26) The variables of race and class intersect in such a way that the ideal norms of motherhood come to reflect the mothering done by white, middle-class women. (27) This ideological privileging divides mothers into essentially two camps: the "Good Mothers" (white middle-class women) and "out-group" mothers (women of color, poor women, lesbian women) who cannot by definition be Good Mothers, and can, at best, hope to be Good Black Mothers or Good Asian Mothers. (28) Single mothers have also been described as belonging in the less-valued group. (29)
Another measure of motherhood that is related to the variable of race and culture, but is less often discussed, is religion. Generally, in Western culture, a Christian mother will have a higher claim to motherhood than a non-Christian mother because the former is more readily seen as embodying the "Christian" virtues of benevolence, forgiveness, and tolerance-virtues that are also perceived to be the hallmarks of good mothering. However, the extent to which religion determines the value of motherhood is ultimately mediated by considerations of race and culture. For example, in popular discourse the Christian identity of an immigrant woman of color does not automatically make her as "good" a mother as a white Christian woman. (30) This is because the immigrant mother is more susceptible to arguments about how Christian she really is, that is, the extent to which her exposure to Christianity has successfully civilized her and eradicated her "otherness." (31)
Finally, the societal value placed on motherhood also depends on the relationship of the father with the mother and child. (32) This third variable functions such that value only attaches to motherhood if there is a father who enjoys legal control over mother and child. (33) This version of motherhood emphasizes paternal presence and control. Therefore, in this version, single mothers have less entitlement to motherhood than their married counterparts. (34)
The permutations of these variables in relation to this present case study are clear. In popular discourse, Andrea Yates as a white, middle-class mother with a supportive husband enjoys a higher moral claim to motherhood than Khoua Her, an immigrant mother with an estranged husband. The factors that support these differential claims were made explicit in the media portrayals of these two women and will be discussed below.
B. Her vs. Yates in the Motherhood Stakes
From the perspective of media reports, Her "fails" on all of the indicia of good motherhood: she is a racial and cultural other, she is poor, and she is a single mother. In relation to the first characteristic, Her's life story is one that is told in the media through the lens of culture and "otherness." Media accounts make it patently clear that Her was not originally from the United States. Her's outsider status is reinforced through the numerous references to the fact that she was a Hmong immigrant, who had spent eight years in the Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand prior to coming to the United States. (35) The repeated descriptions of Her's experience in this refugee camp also have an alien and primitive quality that is designed to set her apart from the Western world which she now inhabits. For example, reports refer to her repeated rapes (Her's own lawyer comments that "[s]he was tortured her whole life.... She was treated worse than you would treat an animal or a slave") and her forced child marriage (in this camp she met her husband, Hang, whom she was "forced" to marry at a young age). (36)
Much is also made of the fact that Her's first pregnancy was at age thirteen; for example, Deu Yang, a parenting nurse, is quoted as saying, "My first impression when I saw her was: Wow, she's so young and she has a baby already." (37) It was also stated that Her "became pregnant at age 12, and by 19 she had six children." (38) A number of articles effectively defined Her by this status as a young mother: "the 24-year-old-woman, a mother since she was 13[.]" (39) Combined with reference to her large number of children (six), (40) these allusions draw implicitly on the stereotype of women of color as lacking control over their sexuality and "wantonly" having a succession of children. (41) The fact that Her continued to have children at such a young age while in the United States is implicitly presented as further evidence of her outsider status; her experience of living in Western culture has not sufficiently civilized her to conform to its birthing and marital practices. The following letter to the editor expresses disconcert with the fact that Hmong culture continued to be pervasive in Her's life, despite her presence in the United States:
Is culture always good? A 13-year-old girl marries an 18-year-old boy. She has her first child before they come to the United States. Once here she has five more children. This girl was pregnant virtually every year that she was a teenager.... In Minnesota it is against the law to have sex with a child under the age of 16, even if the child consents to the act. You can't marry a child under the age of 16.... We are told this marriage pattern is part of Hmong culture. Well, slavery was once part of U.S. culture, female genital mutilation is part of several cultures and child marriage with many children is part of many cultures. Just because something is a part of a culture does not mean it is good or acceptable. Cultural sensitivity should not include something clearly wrong. No teenager should have to spend her teen years bearing and caring for children. (42)
The fact that Her (like Yates), by being a Christian, did act consistently with one important aspect of majoritarian culture in the United States, was insufficient to overcome her position as an outsider. In fact, Her's Christian identity was scarcely reported in the media. (43) When religion was discussed, the reference was to Her's detriment. For example, the prosecutor stated to the media: "I know that she did this for religious reasons.... But to me, that doesn't have anything to do with mental state. If you have a mental state where you can't control yourself without some medication, we treat that differently from someone who decides to do something for religious reasons." (44) Moreover, the prosecutor's assertion that Her acted with religious motivation is surprising because it is not based her own explanations...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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