The Framing of the Shrew: A Study of the Sexualisation of the Female Criminal

• Author: Harriet Burgess
• Position: Senior Sophister LL.B (Law and Business) Candidate
• Pages: 165-181

© 2014 Harriet Burgess and Dublin University Law Society

THE FRAMING OF THE SHREW: A STUDY OF THE

SEXUALISATION OF THE FEMALE CRIMINAL

HARRIET BURGESS*

Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth,

Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,

But that our soft conditions and our hearts,

Should well agree with our external parts?

1

Across history, stories have stereotyped and trivialised women’s violence.

Authors explain away the possibility that female criminal action may be

cognitively rational action. 2 Instead of acknowledging the fallacy of

underlying gender assumptions, violent women are typecast as sexually

deviant. The prominence of sexual language in accounts of female

criminality can be characterised as ‘whore’ narratives, which reduce

women to their sexuality and rob them of their agency to commit crime.

Gouldner describes the depiction of the female criminal as a woman on her

back, rather than a woman fighting back.3 The question of the singularity

of female criminality has long vexed criminologists:

Why is it that we feel differently about women committing crime? It

always seems to me that crime is seen as an inevitable extension of

normal male behaviour, whereas women offenders are thought to

have breached sacred notions of what is deemed to be truly female.4

As a result the whore narrative has been perpetuated in myth,

criminological theory and by the mass media. This article will argue that

this sexualisation of the female offender and their consequent exclusion

from violent agency demonstrates a clear point: women who do not fit our

*Senior Sophister LL.B (Law and Business) Candidate. The author would like to thank

Lynsey Black, for the great literary references and insightful direction.

1 William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, (Clarendon Press, 1921), at 85.

2 Carol Smart, Law, Crime and Sexuality (Sage Publications, 1995), at 25.

3 Wayne Morrison, Theoretical Criminology (London Cavendish, 1995), at 397.

4 Helen Kennedy, Eve Was Fra med (Vintage Books, 2004), at 18.

166 Trinity College Law Review [Vol 17

inherited conceptions of acceptable femininity will continue to be

subordinated through sexualised stereotypes.

5 Morrison raises this issue in

questioning whether

[w]omen exist independently of the male gaze, independently of the

way in which men have interpreted the biological constitution of

(non)women: a constitution which defined and limited her ontology,

her naturalness, her possibilities?6

When characterisations of female criminals link sexual deviance to their

engagement in violence, the woman is denied responsibility for her actions

– rather, she is compelled to do them as a result of her disturbed sexuality.7

In truth, the female criminal’s real offence has been her disruption of

formulaic notions of gender. The ostracisation and singularity of the

female criminal can thus be explained by way of double transgression

theory ; the violent woman has committed two crimes. The first is that of

her violence and the second is that of her defiance of gender stereotypes

that deem her incapable of committing such violence. Society expects

women to embody ‘traditional’ female traits, to be nurturing and

protective. There is a heightened outrage when women’s behaviour rejects

these ideas.8 A societal refusal to accept a rational female offender has

created a sexualised female offender. This whore narrative characterises

women almost exclusively as sexual beings: a woman’s violence is not just

violence, instead it is a sexualised event.9 This gendered characterisation

of women’s violence can be found across time, place and culture in

history. This article first proposes to examine the historical sexualisation

of the female criminal. Proceeding from this will be a consideration of

Cesare Lombroso’s theory of the female criminal. Lombroso’s lasting

influence on cultural perceptions of female offenders shall be

demonstrated with reference to nineteenth century literature, in a

comparative study of The Criminal Woman and Bram Stoker’s novel

Dracula. Lastly the impacts of the ‘whore’ narrative and the present day

sexualisation of female violence will be reviewed. Across the span of

media, literature and theory through the ages it will be demonstrated that

5 Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monster, Whores (Zed Books, 2007), at 55.

6 Morrison, note 3, at 384.

7 Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry, “Reduced To Bad Sex” (2008) International Relations

22(1), at 7.

8 Kennedy, note 4, at 24.

9 Sjoberg and Gentry, note 5, at 46.