Description
Book SynopsisExplores 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.
Trade Review``Represents a significant contribution to the study of violence and women, one that offers productive avenues of development for the emerging fields of new media studies.'' -- Cheryl Simon -- Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Volume 16, number 2, Fall 2007, 200804
``Burfoot and Lord create a space where a critical visual vocabulary on gendered violence, gender and violence, and gender as violence are fused together. The presence of this compilation further demonstrates how the distinct paths of art, activism, and community intersect to challenge the boundaries of academic theory and practice.'' -- Kathryn Travis -- Canadian Woman Studies, Volume 27, number 1, 201002
Table of ContentsTable of Contents for Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence , edited by Annette Burfoot and Susan Lord Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction | Annette Burfoot and Susan Lord Section 1: History, Memory, and Mediations of Murder 1. Mapping Scripts and Narratives of Women Who Kill Their Husbands in Canada, 1866â1954: Inscribing the Everyday | Sylvie Frigon 2. Neither Forgotten Nor Fully Remembered: Tracing an Ambivalent Public Memory on the Tenth Anniversary of the Montreal Massacre | Sharon Rosenberg 3. Missing: On the Politics of Re/Presentation | Zoey Elouard Michele 4. Killing the Killers: Women on Death Row in the United States | Kathleen OâShea 5. âDealing with the Devilâ: Karla Homolka and the Absence of Feminist Criticism | Belinda Morrissey Section 2: Techniques and Technologies of Representing Violence 6. Pearls and Gore: The Spectacle of Woman in Life and Death| Annette Burfoot 7. âI Am Awake in the Place Where Women Dieâ: Violent Death in the Art of Abigail Lane and Jenny Holzer | Lisa Coulthard 8. Women and Murder in the Televirtuality Film | Jack Boozer 9. âIâm in There! I'm One of the Women in That Pictureâ | Margot Leigh Butler 10. Killing Time: The Violent Imaginary of Feminist Media | Susan Lord Section 3: National Trouble: Gendered Violence 11. Dario Argentoâs The Bird with the Crystal Plumage : Caging Womenâs Rage | Frank Burke 12. How Positively Levitating! Chinese Heroines of Kung Fu and Wuxia Pian | Suzie S.F. Young 13. The Madwomen in Our Movies: Female Psycho-Killers in American Horror Cinema | Steven Jay Schneider 14. Reverence, Rapeâand then Revenge: Popular Hindi Cinemaâs âWomenâs Filmâ | Jyotika Virdi 15. In the Name of the Nation: Images of Palestinian and Israeli Women Fighters | Dorit Naaman Sources Biographical Notes Index List of Illustrations Women prisoners at cells (possibly Kingston Penitentiary), c 1900 âLa Corriveau,â cartoon depicting the public exhibition of Madame Corriveau Charlotte Corday by Louis Muller, c 1880 Prisoner dressed up with poodle at Kingston Prison for Women, c 1950 Bench, Marker of ChangeâNatalie Croteau, Vancouver Bench, Marker of Changeâindentation from top, Vancouver Nave for Fourteen QueensââGâ in Steel, Montreal Nave for Fourteen QueensâSteel Pillars in Snow, Montreal PlaqueâEcole Polytechnique, Montreal Angels softball team, Kingston Prison for Women, 1950s Prisoner ballet dancing at Kingston Prison for Women, 1950s Kitchen at Kingston Prison for Women, 1961 âThe Skinned Man,â wax anatomical figure from La Specola, Florence, Italy, c 1785 âWoman Holding Her Plait,â wax anatomical figure from La Specola, Florence, Italy, c 1785 âThe Doll,â wax anatomical figure from La Specola, Florence, Italy, c 1785 âDissected Uterus with Twins at Term,â wax anatomical figure from La Specola, Florence, Italy, c 1785 âBeribboned Penis,â wax anatomical figure from La Specola, Florence, Italy, c 1785 Billboard from ânhiâNo Humans Involvedâ artistsâ project, San Diego, 1992 Gallery installation from ânhiâNo Humans Involvedâ artistsâ project, San Diego, 1992 Scene from Semiotics of the Kitchen , 1974 Scene from The Smiling Madame Beudet , 1923 Scene from The Smiling Madame Beudet , 1923 Scene from Broken Mirrors , 1984 Scene from The Book of Knives , 1996 Scene from The Book of Knives , 1996 Prisonersâ glee club, Kingston Prison for Women, 1955 Mills Eisert escape site, Kingston Prison for Women, 1961 Scene from Teesri Manzil/Third Floor , 1965 Scene from Insaaf ka Taraazu/Scales of Justice , 1980 Scene from The Battle of Algiers , 1965 Scene from The Battle of Algiers , 1965 Dead woman holding flag in hand, from Hill 24 Doesnât Answer , 1955 Dead woman covered with flag, from Hill 24 Doesnât Answer , 1955 Scene from Exodus , 1960 Prisoners tap dancing at Christmas concert, Kingston Prison for Women, 1952 Contributorsâ Bios Jack Boozer is a professor in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University, where he teaches film studies, screenwriting, and adaptation. He has published widely on American film, including Career Movies: American Business and the Success Mystique . His work on individual films includes articles on The Crying Game , Thelma and Louise , and the history of femmes fatales. He is currently completing an edited book, The Process of Adaptation . His forthcoming articles include one on the year 1987 in Hollywood film for a series by Rutgers University Press. Annette Burfoot is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Queenâs University,Kingston. She has published in the sociology of science and technology (as editor of The Encyclopedia of Reproductive Technologies ) and on the representation of gender in science fiction and science-as-fact. She currently studies the formation of modern medical imaging as a historical cultural science study from the point of view of feminist materialism. Frank Burke is a professor of Film at Queenâs University,Kingston. He has published Federico Fellini: Variety Lights to La Dolce Vita and Felliniâs Films: From Postwar to Postmodern and has co-edited Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives . He provided the commentary (along with Peter Brunette) for the 2006 Criterion DVD release of Felliniâs Amarcord . He has published numerous essays on Italian and North American cinema and is currently writing a book for Edinburgh University Press on the Italian sword-and-sandal film of the 1950s and 1960s. Margot Leigh Butler is a theorist, installation artist, and cultural activist. She has a Ph.D. in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths College,University of London, UK, with specializations in politics, philosophy, art, and science and technology studies.Her work has been published in Womenâs Studies International Forum , West Coast Line , The Virtual Embodied , and elsewhere. She lectures in Europe and Canada and is part of the Kootenay School of Writing collective. She lives in Vancouver, where she is curating a reading series called ââTag, we're it!â or âImplicatedness.ââ Lisa Coulthard is an assistant professor of Film Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She has published on Quentin Tarantino, John Woo,Abigail Lane, Kiki Smith, and Stan Douglas. She is currently working on a manuscript on love in contemporary European cinema. Sylvie Frigon holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is Professor and outgoing Chair of the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa. She has co-edited (with Michèle Kérisit) Du corps des femmes: contrÃ'les, surveillances et résistances . She edited a special issue of the journal Criminologie : âLâenfermement des femmes au Canada: une décennie de réformesâ and authored the book Lâhomicide conjugal au féminin: dâhier à aujourdâhui . She has also published a novel, Ãcorchées , on women in prison. She is currently working with Chris Bruckert and Nathalie Duhamel on the social and professional (re)integration of women in conflict with the law and on the issue of mental health of women during and after imprisonment. Dr. Frigon founded the research and action alliance La Corriveau, which is concerned with socially marginalized and criminalized women. She is finishing a manuscript on the body and imprisonment for the Autrement collection in Paris and is writing a book on dance, the body, and imprisonment with Claire Jenny, choreographer and director of the Parisian dance company Point Virgule. Susan Lord teaches film and media cultures at Queenâs University in Kingston. Her main research areas are womenâs film culture, Cuban visual culture, new media, and translocal artist collectives. She is co-editor with Janine Marchessault of Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema and co-editor of Digital Poetics and Politics , a special issue of the journal Public . She has published widely on womenâs film cultures. She is completing a manuscript about Sara Gómez and Cuban documentary in the 1960s. Zoey Ãlouard Michele wrote her chapter in this volume, âMissing: On the Politics of Re/Presentation,â while enrolled as a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at Queenâs University in Kingston, Ontario. In 2005, she left academic life to pursue a career in the skilled trades. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with her husband, René. Belinda Morrissey teaches media and communication studies at the University of Canberra, Australia. She is the author of When Women Kill: Questions of Agency and Subjectivity , and has published articles in several journals, including Social Semiotics , Continuum , and Australian Womenâs Law Journal . She is the author of a chapter in the fort
