Pauline Greenhill

Pedophile crime films as popular criminology: A problem of justice?

This article responds to Nicole Rafter’s recent call to develop a popular criminology using cultural representations of crime and criminal justice to supplement and extend mainstream criminological knowledge. Using representations of child sexual abuse in film, we begin to build a popular criminology of the pedophile. In cinema, this figure opens up a cultural space to interrogate key criminological dilemmas about the nature and shape of justice. Pedophile crime films work through concepts by making emotion central to understanding and by using child sexual abuse as a moral context for otherwise abstract dilemmas. Because of their form as well as their content, recent examples of the subgenre hold the potential to challenge popular conceptions of justice in ways that mainstream academic discourse cannot.

Little Red Riding Hood Crime Films: Critical Variations on Criminal Themes

European and North American crime films since the 1990s reflect changing cinematic styles but also hardening political discourses around criminal responsibility and growing public fears of random violence and predatory strangers. The narrative structure and imagery of “Little Red Riding Hood” conventionally warns about the latter dangers, but can also offer a lesson in self-reliance and the necessity for private action to forestall them. The familiar story provides a malleable cultural referent for a number of films elucidating social, political, and criminological shifts concerning issues of crime, justice, and crime control around the turn of the millennium.

A Feminist Perspective on Bioterror: From Anthrax to Critical Art Ensemble

I n autumn 2001 anthrax was intentionally released through the U.S. mail. With ancestry as ancient as goatskins and dispersal power enhanced by military lab technology, the deadly bacilli puffed through mail-sorting machines and seeped into the skin and lungs of postal workers sorting congressional mail. Symbolically fused with the intentional crashing of four passenger planes by terrorists wielding box cutters, the deliberate release of weaponized anthrax triggered renewed efforts to fight the socalled war on terror at home with a special mandate in the area of bioterror. Since then, basic democratic liberties have been traded for untenable and perverse illusions of safety and control in the polymorphous name of protection from terror. Our critical analysis of the interactive fears and responses generated in and by the bioterror debate between 2001 and 2006 in the United States addresses the militarization of public health and the loss of human rights protections. Using a feminist approach that juxtaposes discourses from apparently disparate domains of art, law, and science, we examine the

Representations of Crime

It is obvious that a criminal’s crimes affect his or her victims. It is less clear how an offender’s noncriminal actions can affect the victims of another’s crimes. But when Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada’s Plug In Gallery, an artist-run contemporary arts space, proposed to display three paintings by executed American serial killer John Wayne Gacy,1 the potential for extension of a criminal’s abusive power by the public presentation of apparently nonviolent visual imagery became a matter of heated debate.

The Most Ambiguous Gift: Cash and the Presentation Wedding Tradition in Manitoba

Following Pierre Bourdieu, we understand gifts as fundamentally ambiguous. Both the concept and practice of giving simultaneously affirm and deny ‘the logic of exchange’ (the idea that the value of what one gives should be approximately equal to that of what one receives in return). Contemporary gift practices routinely work to humanize and remove their essentially capitalist aspects from the realm of the economic. In giving and receiving, participants seek to conceal transactional realities by emphasising affective relationships and ensuring that reciprocity is as inchoate as possible. Gifts and their attendant relationships can transcend capitalist economics because of what Marcel Mauss calls their ‘formal pretence and social deception’. Euro-North-American gift objects are grounded in practices designed to obscure capitalism’s reach into the close social relationships they mark. But cash gifts pose an even more complex dilemma. Thus, when giving and receiving money, participants in the so-called ‘presentation wedding’ tradition we discuss here deploy extensive coding (‘a set of signals [ . . . ] that protect the creator from the consequences of openly expressing particular messages’). Disguising the cash gift’s character avoids money’s crass and uncouth qualities noted above by Jeanne Hamilton, as we will detail below.

English immigrants’ narratives of linguistic and cultural confusion: Examples of ethnic expression from Ontario

Abstract Ethnicity is viewed from the perspective of folkloristics as an invented cultural construct rather than as an objective fact. The English are not usually seen as ‘ethnics’ in Canada. Yet personal experience and generalization narratives of English immigrants to Ontario focus on experiences of cultural and linguistic distinctions between themselves and other Canadians. Immigrants, through these stories, develop a concept of English ethnicity which centres on the perception of cultural and linguistic differences. Though the actual content of such differences varies from one immigrant to another, they have a common evaluation of the correctness and naturalness of the English alternative.

Team Snow Queen: feminist cinematic ‘misinterpretations’ of a fairy tale

Abstract Four women directors’ live-action films available in English – Päivi Hartzell’s feature Lumikuningatar (The Snow Queen, 1986), Danishka Esterhazy’s short The Snow Queen (2005), Tamar van den Dop’s feature Blind (2007), and Catherine Breillat’s feature La belle endormie (The Sleeping Beauty, 2010) – use Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Snow Queen’ as hypotext. Explorations of gendered positions in culture and in film, directly linked to a readily identifiable fairy tale, these works offer a compelling example of how geographically and temporally dispersed adaptations can share perspectives beyond their common source material, ones which I argue can be directly linked to what one director felicitously called a (feminist) ‘misinterpretation’ of the original. First, their Snow Queens are lookers in two senses: having a beautiful physical appearance, and actually looking and seeing within the films’ diegeses. Second, they show the Snow Queen’s physical movements and gestures as stylised or unusual. Third, they conflate the characters of Gerda and Kai and/or problematise their gender, making it ambiguous, doubling it, or rendering it in composite. Fourth, unlike Andersen’s story, these films’ climactic scenes focus on interactions/relations between Kai/Gerda and the Snow Queen.