Moving Targets: Women, Murder, and Representation

by Helen Birch (Editor)

The rampaging female has become a new cliché in Hollywood cinema, a sexy beauty stabbing and shooting her way to box-office success. Fatal Attraction , Thelma and Louise , The Hand That Rocks the Cradle , and Single White Female are a few of the recent mainstream films that have attracted huge audiences. Meanwhile, true accounts of a teenager shooting her lover's wife and a battered woman bludgeoning her husband to death get prime news media coverage—and are quickly made into TV movies.

This pioneering collection of essays looks at our enduring fascination with women who murder. The authors explore how both fictional and real women are represented, as well as the way society responds to these women. The result is an often shocking picture of female violence that covers a vast the Australian outback, a Florida highway, an Austrian hospital, a French village, and Hollywood. The women are as diverse as their middle-class housewives, prostitutes, house maids, nurses, high-powered professionals.

There is much here to provoke controversy. Society's uncertainty over the role of premenstrual syndrome, the fear of lesbianism, female violence as self-defense against patriarchy, and "appropriate" female behavior are issues that push buttons on several levels. Moving Targets is must-reading for anyone concerned with violence and representations of women in our culture.

Genres: Nonfiction, Crime

302 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 1993

Reviews

[Rebekka · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book went into really good detail on a number of topics surrounding female criminality, and used a good amount of case studies to explain

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first essay in this book was the one I liked best--an analysis of reactions in modern French philosophy, psychoanalysis, poetry and theater to the murder of a woman and her daughter by their two maids.

Most of the other essays are on a more conventional cultural level--discussing women accused of murder in terms of how they are represented in the popular media (newspapers, tabloids, films) and in the legal system. While much of the book is at the level of a "true crime" work, at times it gets theoretical, with mention, for instance, of Jacques Derridaor the signifier/ signified split.

With the exception of the French women in the first essay, the discussion of femme fatales in Hollywood films, and an essay on Aileen Wuornos, most of the essays are about British or Australian women.

One thing the book could have done with is some pictures of the women discussed. Both the first and the second essay begin with descriptions of famous photographs of the accused. Although it is possible to find the photographs online with a Google search, it would have been more convenient (and would have made more sense, insofar as there is emphasis on the photographs) to include reproductions of the pictures described in the book.

Acquired Sept 17, 2008
Gift from Jenn

[Teamhair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moving Targets is a collection of 10 essays examining the representation of women who murder. It is thematically wide-ranging incorporating essays on intimate murders, infanticide, murders in care enviroments, domestic murders and serial killings. The primary focus of the essays is the portrayal in the public domain of women who commit murder. All of the essays are thought-provoking and raise questions about the way that women who kill are constructed in the public imagination as being somehow less feminine and acting against nature in their actions. It was published in 1993 and has aged well. The arguments contained within are still relevant to society and interesting. I would heartily hrecommend this book to anyone interested in the politics of gender as a social construct or the means by which arts and media shape public consciousness.