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Article Excerpt
When women commit violent crimes they are seen to have breached
two laws: the law of the land, which forbids violence, and the much more fundamental "natural" law, which says women are passive carers, not active aggressors. (Lloyd 1995: 36) It is the structures of discourses which determine the discursive constitution of individuals as subjects ... Individuals are both the site and the subjects of discursive struggle for their identity. (Weedon 1987: 97) Society provides a very narrow discourse with which to situate the violent woman. (Hird 2002: 108)
The Violent Woman has only recently been a subject of considered attention by feminist criminologists (Lloyd 1995; Shaw 1995; Dell 1999; Hird 2002; Comack and Balfour 2004; Morrisey 2003). This is not to say, however, that she has been absent in academic and popular discourse. Early criminologists such as Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero (1895) were content to cast criminal women as "bad," the antithesis of the "good" law-abiding woman. Whereas "good" women were characterized as gentle, chaste, and caring wives and mothers, "criminal" women were cast as wicked, manipulative, and deceitful. The Violent Woman was branded as particularly unnatural; her actions betrayed her womanhood. Lacking "maternal instinct" and "ladylike qualities," she was deemed to be a "monster" (Lombroso and Ferrero 1895: 152). More recently, characterizations of violent women as "monsters" have become the fodder of Hollywood films and other media--especially with the execution of America's first female serial murder, Aileen Wuornos, and the conviction of "Canada's most notorious female offender," (2) Karla Homolka, for her part in the sexual torture and deaths of three young women. In the Canadian context, media commentators were quick to label violent women such as Homolka not only as "bad" but as "mad." Patricia Pearson (1995), for instance, defines Homolka as a "competitive narcissist" who was willing to offer up innocent victims (including her own sister) to appease the sexual desires of her sociopathic partner, Paul Bernardo.
Indeed, reliance on psychological constructs has been frequent in efforts to make sense of women who engage in violence. Battered woman syndrome has been legally recognized in cases of women who kill (R. v. Lavallee) as a psychological condition that renders women in abusive relationships helpless and powerless, and therefore unable to leave their violent partners (Walker 1979, 1987). Similarly, women who kill their newborns are said to be suffering from postpartum depression (Dobson and Sales 2000; Spinelli 2003; Hamilton and Harberger 1992). In both cases, women's violence is a sign of individual pathology, attributed to an underlying psychological disorder.
Feminists have had an uneasy time in addressing the issue of women's violence. With the advent of the Violence Against Women movement in the 1970s, the focus of feminist research and advocacy work was fixed on addressing the widespread and pervasive nature of male violence against women. This violence was understood as a manifestation of patriarchy, a structure and ideology that privileges men over women (Brownmiller 1975; MacKinnon 1983; Kelly 1988). Women's status as "victims" figured prominently in this work. As a result, when the issue of women's violence began to surface in the 1990s, feminists were inclined to argue that women's use of violence was a consequence of their own victimization experiences--specifically, an act of self-defence against an abusive partner (see, e.g., Noonan 1993; Stubbs 1994).
Writers such as Pearson (1997; see also Laframboise 1996; Dutton 1994), however, strenuously objected to this "abuse excuse." According to Pearson, the violent woman is not the passive victim that feminists would have us believe but, rather, a "responsible actor imposing her will upon the world" (1997: 23). While feminists were intent on gendering violence by drawing its connections to patriarchy, Pearson "de-genders" violence (Berns 2001), claiming it to be a "human rather than gendered phenomenon" (1997: 232).
Recent efforts to make sense of the Violent Woman, then, have revolved around three different (yet not disconnected) constructs: "victim," "bad," and "mad." While these sense-making efforts have been mostly fixed on "notorious" cases such as those of Homolka and Wuornos, it is the more routine forms and manifestations of women's violence and their representations in academic, criminal-justice, and public discourse that are the subject matter of this article.
In this respect, postmodern scholars have encouraged us to be attentive to the role that discourses--"historically specific systems of meaning which form the identities of subjects and objects" (Howarth 2000: 9)--play in framing how we think about our social world, one another, and ourselves. Within criminology, feminist postmodernism has led to an interrogation of the conditions under which criminal-justice officials claim to possess knowledge about criminalized women and the processes whereby such claims are translated into practices that classify, define, and so domesticate their behaviour (see, e.g., Worrall 1990; Carrington 1993; Howe 1995). In raising important "how" questions--such as how women are constituted or defined by dominant discourses (see, e.g., Smart 1989, 1992; Narine 1997)--feminist postmodernists direct our attention to the ways in which discursive categories--such as "victim," "mad," and "bad"--frame our knowledge about criminalized women who use violence. One aspect that has been missing in discussions of the Violent Woman, however, is how women who use violence constitute themselves.
Postmodern writers have suggested that it is through language and discourse that our sense of self is produced. In Chris Weedon's (1987: 21) terms, language "is a place where our sense of ourselves, our subjectivity, is constructed." In other words, subjectivity or identity is discursively constructed. In her study of women in the sex trade, Joanna Phoenix (2000) adopts a particular understanding of identity as a discursive device that permits women to make sense of (and thus be sustained within) prostitution. In analysing her interviews with the women, Phoenix treats their narratives as a reflection of this identity-making process. Her aim was to uncover "the personage constructed within the autobiographical narrative," the "mediated identity that emerges in the discourses of involvement in prostitution of the women" (2000: 42). Phoenix, then, does not understand identity as "the 'essence' of a person or a set of personal characteristics; nor is it used to signify the central author (self) who elaborates and gives meaning to their story" (42). Rather than denoting selfhood, identity is understood to be "the constellation of different, diverse and multiple ways in which the women represented themselves in their stories" (42). It is the imagined or portrayed personage of these women that draws Phoenix's interest.
Similarly, our aim is to use interviews with criminalized women to uncover the identities reflected and represented in the women's narratives. How and where is violence situated in these women's accounts of their lives? How do they constitute themselves? What discourses do they draw from (and resist)? In particular, do the prevailing constructs of the Violent Woman as "victim," "bad," or "mad" have resonance for these women? We begin our discussion by describing the nature of our study and the women who participated in it. We then move on to consider, in turn, the prevailing constructs of the Violent Woman as "victim," "bad," and "mad," relying on the women's narratives to interrogate these discourses. In the process, we advance the argument that each of these discursive constructs, while having some resonance in the women's accounts, fails to capture the complexity of their lives. Because identity is fractured and multiple, violence in the lives of criminalized women cannot be rendered plausible by simply imposing a master status template. We conclude by considering the implications of this analysis for making sense of women's violence.
The study
Semi-structured interviews (lasting from one to two hours) were conducted with 18 women in the summer and fall of 2001. The women's participation was solicited in two ways. First, a brief presentation was made to a Women and Anger group sponsored by the local Elizabeth Fry Society explaining the purpose of the study--to explore women's use of violence and the meanings they attach to it. (3) The women were given the researcher's phone number to call if they were willing to participate. Two of the women who responded were subsequently interviewed in a private room at the Elizabeth Fry office. (4) To solicit more interviews, the principal researcher visited the provincial women's prison and made a presentation during each of the two lunch sittings. The presentation explained who she was, previous research that she had conducted at the prison, and her interest in speaking with the women about their use of violence and the meanings they attach to it. The women were then asked to indicate their willingness to be interviewed to one of the prison staff, who then passed along their names to the researcher. (5) The interviews, which were tape-recorded and later transcribed by the research assistant, were conducted in a private room in the prison. The interviews were designed to elicit general information about participants' biographies as well as their accounts of violent events they had experienced (both as victims and as perpetrators) in their lives and the meanings they attached to these experiences. (6)
As a group, the women who participated in the study presented social characteristics similar to those reported in previous research on criminalized women (Adelberg and Currie 1993; Carlen 1988; Chesney-Lind and Rodriguez 1983; Comack 1996; Daly 1998; Gilfus 1992). That is, criminalized women are most likely to be young, members of a racially marginalized group, impoverished, and with children for whom they are the sole providers or caregivers. The women in the study ranged in age from 18 to 60 years old, with an average age of 31; 72% of the sample (13 women) identified themselves as Aboriginal or Metis, and the remaining five women were white. In terms of educational attainment, the majority of the women (12) had a Grade 11 education or less; two women had completed Grade 12 or its equivalent; two had a college degree; and two had some university education. Consistent with their educational attainment, half of the women were employed in low-skilled jobs or in the service sector (e.g., as office cleaners and restaurant workers). A minority of the women (3) had been employed, at some point in their history, in skilled professions (e.g., laboratory technician and legal secretary). Six of the women--all of them Aboriginal--had no formal employment history to speak of, and nine of the Aboriginal women discussed working in the street sex trade to support themselves. All of the women presented as heterosexual. Two-thirds were on their own at the time of the interview (nine were single and three were separated from their male partners); six women were currently involved in a dating or common-law relationship with a man. All but two had children. The number of children ranged from one to six, with an average of three.
The violence used by the women ranged from relatively minor incidents (pushing, slapping) to more severe assaults (with a weapon or causing bodily injuries). Two of the participants had been charged with attempted murder, one as a youth and one as an adult. The two most frequent contexts in which the women's violence took place were within intimate partner relationships and during the commission of a robbery; eight of the women had used violence...
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