Lizzie Seal

Emotion and allegiance in researching four mid- 20th-century cases of women accused of murder

This article examines methodological issues of emotion and allegiance in relation to researching, from archival sources, gender representation in mid-20th-century cases of women accused of murder. Through a discussion of four women’s cases, I explore this as a deeply ambivalent experience because the research induced both empathic and negative feelings towards the women. This seemed to conflict with my aims as a feminist researcher to highlight derogatory constructions of gender in the criminal justice system. I argue that a reflexive approach is necessary in order to carry out sensitive archival research and conclude that negotiating the attendant ambivalence and complexity deepens ethical engagement.

Pussy Riot and feminist cultural criminology: a new ‘Femininity in Dissent’?

This comment considers the mainstream, online Western news media’s reaction to the imprisonment of three members of the Russian feminist punk band, Pussy Riot, in August 2012. Of particular concern is the band’s style of feminist political protest; it argues that their case is of significance to feminist cultural criminology. Drawing on Young’s analysis of media censuring of feminist political protest as deviance, the contrasting, positive representation in this case of Pussy Riot as dissidents is explored. This positive representation can be understood with regard to Western geopolitical concerns, but also stresses the effectiveness of Pussy Riot in communicating their political message.

Women, Drugs and the Death Penalty: Framing Sandiford

This article examines the impact and significance of women subject to capital punishment for drug offences. Women are subject to the death penalty for drug offences; wherever data are available they describe low‐level offenders, primarily drug mules. Sandifords death sentence prompts widespread discussion about her, her culpability and the appropriateness of her punishment drawing on drug war discourse, and death penalty tropes. Framing analysis reveals the powerful and persistent nature of gendered binaries. The use of capital punishment against female mules troubles the gendered binaries that underpin US‐led drug war discourse, and highlights the death penalty as a gendered punishment.

Exploring the Transgressive Imagination

Transgressive Imaginations focuses upon the breaking of rules and taboos involved in ‘doing crime’, including violent crime, as represented in fictive texts and ethnographic research. Here transgression is understood not only as exceeding boundaries or limits (Jenks, 2003, p. 7) but as resistance, protest and escape. Particular emphasis is placed upon the spatial, temporal and sensory dimensions of ‘doing crime’, ‘deviance’ and ‘social control’ in an era of globalisation, as well as ‘the mediated construction of crime and crime control’ (Ferrell 1999, p. 395) and the portrayal of ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’ in different cultural forms.

Crime, Poverty and Resistance on Skid Row

This final chapter takes as its starting point the need to uncover the counter-narratives, the hidden histories of the people labelled as deviants and criminals in inner-city neighbourhoods. In doing so, the chapter draws upon community arts-based research conducted by O’Neill and Stenning (2011) in downtown eastside Vancouver (skid row) where ‘community’ is documented through the eyes of the inhabitants — the binners, sex workers, street vendors and artists struggling to make out in circumstances not of their choosing1. One dominant theme in the research — the struggle for recognition — emerges against depictions that categorise and record residents as abject, ‘other’ and ‘different’.

Performativity, border-crossings and ethics in a prison-based creative writing project

We critically reflect on insights from our experiences as female researchers on a creative writing project in a men’s prison, including the emotional impact on the men involved and the ways in which our role as participant researchers impacted deeply on us. Juxtaposed starkly with the physical constraints of the prison, a sense of journeys emerged as significant throughout the study, particularly the symbolic crossing of boundaries. We draw on theories of performativity from both Feminist and Symbolic Interactionist perspectives to frame our understanding of the experience of being participant researchers in prison creative writing workshops, and also consider associated ethical issues.

‘She killed not from hate, but from love’: motherhood, melodrama and mercy killing in the case of May Brownhill

ABSTRACT This article examines press portrayals of and public reactions to a ‘mercy killing’ in 1930s England. May Brownhill, sixty-two, killed her ‘invalid’ adult son by giving him an overdose of aspirin and poisoning him with coal gas. Through the conventions of melodrama, May was portrayed in the press as a respectable, devoted and self-sacrificial mother deserving of sympathy. The case also resonated with contemporary debates about euthanasia. It is an historical example of popular leniency, whereby although guilty of a crime, an individual is not seen as deserving of punishment. The case contributes to our understanding of how popular leniency was shaped by gender, class and age, and by contemporary views on ‘mercy killing’.

Albert Pierrepoint and the cultural persona of the twentieth-century hangman

Albert Pierrepoint was Britain’s most famous 20th-century hangman. This article utilises diverse sources in order to chart his public representation, or cultural persona, as hangman from his rise to prominence in the mid-1940s to his portrayal in the biopic Pierrepoint (2005). It argues that Pierrepoint exercised agency in shaping this persona through publishing his autobiography and engagement with the media, although there were also representations that he did not influence. In particular, it explores three iterations of his cultural persona – the Professional Hangman, the Reformed Hangman and the Haunted Hangman. Each of these built on and reworked historical antecedents and also communicated wider understandings and contested meanings in relation to capital punishment. As a hangman who remained in the public eye after the death penalty in Britain was abolished, Pierrepoint was an important, authentic link to the practice of execution and a symbolic figure in debates over reintroduction. In the 21st century, he was portrayed as a victim of the ‘secondary trauma’ of the death penalty, which resonated with worldwide campaigns for abolition.

Transgressing Sex Work: Ethnography, Film and Fiction

The first quotation by Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet in 1836 illuminates the fact that prostitution is accepted by bourgeois society (selling sex is not illegal) but the prostitute, the whore is not accepted, she is ‘other’ perceived as immoral, a danger, a threat to ‘normal’ femininity and, as a consequence suffers social exclusion, marginalisation and ‘whore stigma’. On the other hand, the second quotation illustrates that there are deeply embedded economic and sociopolitical dynamics involved in explaining and understanding prostitution. Like the ‘criminal women’ discussed in Chapter 3, sex workers occupy an anomalous cultural position, and selling sex is much more complex than either a question of morality/immorality or economics.

Violent Female Avengers in Popular Culture

The criminal woman occupies an anomalous cultural position. Not only does she transgress society’s legal codes, she also transgresses its norms of gender as the active flouting of rule and convention that criminality entails is perceived as at odds with feminine passivity. This conception of the female criminal as ‘doubly deviant’, a term coined by Heidensohn (1996), is now well established within criminology. Heidensohn explains that the effect of double deviance is to stigmatise women in the criminal justice system and to leave them open to harsh punishment. The significance of her thesis is in highlighting how feminist criminologists need to pay attention not only to the formal social controls that can be imposed on women by the criminal justice system, but also the informal social controls regulated by constructions of normative gender. These informal social controls are of course more widely experienced as they extend into other areas of social life such as the workplace, leisure activities and interpersonal relationships.