Abstract
We would like to study the difference in media coverage and cultural understanding of women serial killers. As case studies, we will focus on the United States serial killer Aileen Wuornos, and Phoolan Devi, India’s “Bandit Queen.” We are not equating these cases, but believe the media coverage surrounding both of them constructs specific narratives that heavily rely on conceptions of womanhood. In choosing these two cases, we acknowledge that there is great uncertainty and controversy surrounding both of them, so we are not trying to find the “truth”. Instead, we want to examine the media converge surrounding these two women killers and explore how that coverage upheld dominant power structures. We will examine the media coverage surrounding three issues: childhood, demonization/glorification, and femininity/masculinity . We will use a variety of sources including newspapers, academic articles, movies, and even true crime novels to examine how the narratives around these women are constructed. By comparing the media portrayals of cases of two serial killers, Aileen Wuornos and Phoolan Devi, we highlight that the narratives constructed around these cases perpetuate victim blaming that manifest in different ways due to hegemonic ideas of womanhood. Therefore, by offering a cross-cultural examination of these criminal cases we will unveil that these cases should not be studied in isolation.
Biographies
Emma Kalkowski-Farrand is a third year Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and Philosophy double major from Omaha, NE. She loves watching Criminal Minds which sparked her interest in how serial killers are portrayed in the media. Emma’s other interests include baking and watching terrible science fiction shows.
Indira Kapur is a rising third-year at Grinnell College from Kolkata, India. She is a Gender Women’s and Sexuality Studies major with a keen interest in cross-cultural/intersectional feminism and transformative social change. She enjoys controversial conversations about religion, food critiquing, music and chai.
Martha Beliveau is a soon-to-be second year from Norman, Oklahoma. Though she hasn’t declared a major, she is a intended history and/or political science major. Her interests include film editing, museum archival, and drinking excessive amounts of water.
Credits
We would like to thank Gina Donovan for all her help with technology and her patience with all our questions. We would also like to thank Professor Lewis for her guidance. Finally, we would like to thank Makennah Little, Annabel Higgin-Houser, Jacob Horstman, Amanda Nelson, Jasper Egge, and Bryce Cook for taking the time out of their day to answer our interview questions.
Music credit???
Bibliography
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Transcript
“a female serial killer”
“she was like a spider, awaiting her prey”
“there’s just something inside of her; I believe she needed to die”
“Aileen Wuornos’ life was tragic”
(All quotes are from The Specialist’s Aileen Wuornos: Damsel of Death)
Martha: This is Martha,
Emma: Emma,
Indira: Indira
Martha:and we’re speaking from Grinnell College on May 6, 2018.
Martha: Today, we’re looking at, you guessed it, serial killers. But, more specifically, we’re looking at two women serial killers: Aileen Wuornos based in the United States and Phoolan Devi, based in India.
The narratives constructed around these cases produce systems of victim-blaming that in turn reinforce hegemonic ideas of womanhood.
So by looking at the media narratives around these cases, we hope to gain clarity about what this means about the broader culture.
Before we get into the cases themselves, we should clarify that we’re not necessarily interested in uncovering the quote unquote truth of these cases or assigning guilt or blame. Cause that just gets messy quickly. Instead, we really want to explore how these cases ultimately reveal more about their underlying cultures than they do about the individuals implicated in the situations themselves.
Emma: So to begin our discussion about these two cases, we are going to give you a little bit of background about general information and the media portrayals..
Aileen Wuornos, sometimes called Lee, killed seven men in Florida along highway routes between November 1989 and November 1990 using a .22-caliber gun. She was a sex worker and claimed that she had acted in self-defense after each man attempted to sexually assault her. Every man she killed was shot multiple times, ranging from two to nine times. Wuornos also stole various items from the men she killed, including money and cars which she described as her “final revenge” against them for trying to hurt her. She was arrested on January 9, 1991 and confessed to six murders after a series of taped phone conversations with her lover, Tyria Moore. She was convicted of six counts of first degree murder and was executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002. Much of the media attention surrounding Wuornos focused on her gender, both denying and affirming her femininity in different ways. Many sources discuss how she is atypical woman serial killer and seek to masculinize- her and her killing style. However, most narratives are invested in establishing the moral character of her victims and accuse her of preying on men who were just trying to help a woman in supposed distress.
Indira: Now looking at the case from India, Phoolan Devi, also known as the Beautiful Bandit, the Goddess of Flowers and India’s fiery Bandit Queen, was a lower-caste woman who sought revenge for her gangrape by joining a gang and killing the perpetrators in what was called the “Behmai massacre.” This act was seen as righteous lower-caste rebellion and Phoolan herself as an “oppressed feminist Robin Hood.(“India’ Bandit Queen)”
Many believe that Phoolan transcended the trauma of her gangrape in 1981, when she returned to the village and recognized two men who took part in that gangrape. When they refused to reveal the identity of the others involved she lined 22 upper-caste villagers and killed them. India was rattled, it was the largest dacoit (banditry) massacre since the founding of modern India. And it was triply shocking: because of its scale, because it-it was led by a woman, and because a woman of a lower caste murdered men of a vastly higher one. After being hunted for two years, Phoolan Devi negotiated terms of her surrender. She was charged with 48 crimes, including 30 charges of banditry and kidnapping and remained in prison for 11 years.
In 1996, two years after she was released, Phoolan Devi ran for local office and won. On 25 July 2001, Phoolan Devi was returning from the Parliament when she was shot dead by masked assassins. The media portrayals surrounding this case focus primarily on her sexual assault and position her as a victim in an overarching oppressive casteist patriarchal structure. However, this narrative is not fully agreed upon by Phoolan herself or by author Mala Sen who did extensive research for her book on Phoolan’s life. According to Sen, Phoolan’s becoming a bandit had nothing to do with caste or rape. So, why has all this been glossed over and why is her story presented in terms of caste warfare and sexual violence? I don’t think there is a clear answer to these questions.
Music
Martha: In order to make these controversial cases digestable we’ve split the analysis of these narratives into three major categories: first we analyze Wuornos’ and Devi’s childhoods, then we look at the way Wuornos is demonized while Devi is glorified, and finally, we look at how constructions of masculinity and femininity strongly inform the overarching narratives. But first, since so much of true crime is concerned with serial killer behavior formed in childhood, what narratives exist surrounding Aileen Wuornos’ childhood?
Emma: Aileen Wuornos was born on February 29, 1956. She never met her biological father and her biological mother abandoned her and her older brother, Keith, with ah their maternal grandparents at an early age. So a lot of the narratives around Wuornos’s early life focus on the abuse she suffered at the hands of her grandfather. He was definitely physically abusive specifically towards Aileen, and some accounts say sexually abusive as well. Another aspect that’s focused on is how Aileen started having sex with boys at an early age, some say as young as eleven, in exchange for cigarettes, food, and other products. Many of these narratives sort of construct that she was lonely and awkward and sort of a, like, failure to gain boys’ attention so this was the only way she knew to reach for companionship.
Indira: Yeah, I definitely seen a lot of common patterns here in the narrative, especially around sexual abuse and also you said that Aileen had sex with boys at an early age, or so it’s believed in the media, and Phoolan Devi also had a reputation for quote unquote “promiscuity” at an early age. In fact, it’s believed that she was married off because of such a reputation early on in her life.
So she was born to a lower-caste poor household on August 10, 1963 in a small village in Uttar Pradesh, India. And the media coverage surrounding her case paints a sympathetic narrative of her life and attempts to justify her taking to banditry as a result of the oppression and maltreatment she faced since the early years of her life. So most accounts stress on how she was ah married at the age of 11 to an abusive man who was thrice her age – they focus on marital rape as the primary cause for her turning to a life of banditry. In fact, the popular film based on her life called “Bandit Queen” made by Shekhar Kapur supposedly aims to reveal the brutal “truth” of the oppression of women and lower castes in India by portraying Phoolan as a victim in every stage of her life. But what’s interesting is that author Mala Sen and Phoolan Devi herself have rejected Kapur’s romanticized film version as a quote unquote “true” depiction of her life. According to her autobiography, Phoolan’s first act of rebellion was over a property dispute with her uncle at the age of 10 before she was married and so I found this interesting a quote in a blog that said “she did not to be raped to protest” (Roy). And I think this really highlights the way women in India are treated. Or are looked upon as if they only have a voice after something bad has happened, or after they have been victimized, or sexually assaulted. In fact, it’s believed that in Phoolan’s case that it was her uncle who got her kidnapped by a band of dacoits to take revenge on the property dispute that ultimately led her on the path to join a gang. Yet, all popular media accounts write this one dimensional story of herlife making it a formula-ridden Rape-Revenge story thereby robbing her life of all its nuance and complexity.
Music
Indira: Can you name a woman serial killer?
Interviewee 1: No
Interviewee 2: No, I don’t know
Interviewee 3: No, I don’t know single one
Interviewee 4: I cannot
Music
Martha: Next, even though Wuornos and Devi are both given the same title of serial killer, this does not necessarily mean they are treated the same way.Wuornos is demonized while Devi is glorified.
Emma:As mentioned earlier, there is an obsession with affirming the moral character of the men Wuornos killed. Again we not saying that whether or not these men were good people, we are simply talking about the media coverage surrounding them. So several accounts, such as the true firm novel Lethal Intent, describe one of the men she killed, David Spears as a “perfect gentleman” and “all around nice guy” and most book versions I have encountered offer extensive testimonies from families of the men Wuornos killed about their moral character (Russell 182; Wuornos & Berry-Dee 75). There is also testimony from Wuornos’s family about her but that’s only to, like, affirm her as a criminal and as, like, out of control instead of talking about any of her, any good attributes she might have had. The first man she killed, Richard Malory, had been convicted of rape before this but most of the accounts minis this or don’t mention it. One account tries to downplay this by describing him as a simply a peeping tom who was just a maladjusted harmless teenage (Russell 385). Which, there is a lot there. As Pearsons points out in her article, “The Trouble With Aileen Wuornos, “Feminism’s First Serial Killer,”’ this serves to both discredit Wuornos and absolve the men of any suspicion, casting them as purely good Samaritans that were trying to help a woman who then took advantage of their generosity (Pearsons 262). And so it serves to demonize Wuornos further by glorifying her victims.
Indira: I think that’s the key difference between the two cases because Phoolan Devi was made into a hero – not just by the lower caste but by the entire nation. I found this quote in a publication that I thought was really interesting and its says,
“Journalists; politicians; some 300 cops; and others from across the dry, impoverished center of the world’s largest democracy knew Phoolan Devi as a hero, a bandit, a murderess, and a goddess long before they saw her in the flesh. Phoolan Devi, India’s celebrated Bandit Queen, was not a woman, but a legend (Synder).”
I think this concept of Phoolan becoming a legend is really interesting. And Arundhati Roy, celebrated author, mentions in her article “that Phoolan is suffering from a case of Legenditis” which I think is funny because she explains that she ceases to exist as a woman or a human being (Roy). She is only a version of herself, a version constructed by the media, by politicians, by journalists and scholars.
And it think this is especially true because her story is so complex and layered, yet she is only remembered as a fiery symbol against caste oppression, a criminal in the eyes of the law or a survivor who took revenge against her rapists. I also think that this glorification is problematic because “Phoolan Devi in part becomes a hero because she is not quite real. She is just a screen onto which we project our fantasies of bravery, salvation, and justice (Snyder)”.
Music
Indira: Can you describe a woman serial killer?
Interviewee 5: A woman who kills multiple people serially.
Indira: What comes to your mind when you think of a woman serial killer?
Interviewee 6: I mean I’ve never personally seen or heard about a female serial killer. However, I would suppose she is probably in her middle-aged, like just how serial killer males are. That’s probably- that’s about all I got though.
Indira: Okay.
Interviewee 6: White, probably, uhm.
Interviewee 7: Basically I just don’t think of women as serial killers. I think of women more as like, if they’re going to like commit, some heinous act, it’s going to be like killing their husband and kids.
Music
Martha: So why is Wuornos demonized while Devi is glorified? Ultimately, it comes down to constructions of masculinity and femininity that have attached themselves to these cases.
Emma: So Wuornos’s gender exists in this weird liminal space where there is an obsession with her as a woman serial killer, emphasis on woman, but her actions can only be legitimized or understood through ascribing her masculine qualities. So there’s this obsession with oh she used a gun, she uhm, like attacked strangers and all this that are typically coded as masculine traits. So her femininity is focused on but her femininity can only be read as a failure of femininity. And in order to say like no real woman could do what she has done, they have to focus on her masculine appearance or masculine actions in order to save conventional femininity and sort of cast her out of conventional femininity.
Indira: Yeah I also see this overemphasis on gender in Phoolan Devi’s case. As I have said before her case has been oversimplified into a rape-revenge saga – resulting in her becoming the symbol of womanhood – scorned and avenged. She is constantly victimized and I think this victimization maintains hegemonic power structures and hierarchies that favor masculinity and undermine femininity. When she isn’t victimized, the credit of her bravery is attributed to her quote unquote “masculine” traits. She is described as the “dominant partner” in her relationship with her husband and is also seen as the “man in the family”.
But if she is not masculinized, she is made into a helpless victim and sometimes her very identity as a bandit is also challenged in order to protect this idealized femininity.
And I think a quote by a police superintendent in the region where Phoolan Devi was operating at the time reveals this – he says, “‘I don’t look upon her as a dacoit but as a child that has lost her way. We will find her and put her on the right path (Snyder).” Thereby looking upon her as simply a helpless girl that needs saving.
The film “Bandit Queen” also maintains the tragic story of a poor oppressed girl who was misguided due to her fate. Phoolan’s image in the film is one of a moral, virtuous girl, who only had one lover and who only tried to turn to banditry to avenge her rape. So, it seems as if the film doesn’t make a case against rape but against the rape of a quote unquote “nice and moral” woman.
Martha: It’s been 28 years since Wuornos’ final murder and 37 years since the massacre that made Devi famous. What legacies do each leave behind?
Emma: In 2002, Wuornos was executed by lethal injection. What is the legacy she leaves behind?
She is denied any nuance. Her legacy can be summed up in three words: woman serial killer. She is simplified to a lesbian serial killer or feminist’s first serial killer but these support narratives of lesbian or feminists as man haters. These projections affirm archetypes that we can place women into without allowing for contextualization or nuance.
Indira: In 2001, at the age of 37 Phoolan was shot dead in front of her home in Delhi for still-unknown reasons. But many believe her legend has grown more since her death. Nonetheless, she does still remain a legend – a mystified symbol of justice for women.
Why have all the other parts of her story been glossed over and instead presented in terms of caste warfare or revenge against rape? Maybe it’s to satisfy the western palate of seeing non-western “third world” people as exotic, traditional, backward, and oppressed.
But despite the heroic story and legend – Did Phoolan Devi change the moral calculus of womanhood in India? Perhaps not. “Today if a girl talks back to her parents, they might say, ‘don’t talk back, don’t be a Phoolan Devi,’” (Snyder).
Music
Martha: What do these cases leave us with? While the narratives surrounding Wuornos and Devi differ in the ways in which they demonize or glorify, and differ in constructions of femininity and masculinity. The image of the villain, Wuornos, and the vigilante, Devi, serve as example of how popular narrative constructions seek to pigeonhold women into simplified master narratives. Even in a subject as seemingly benign as true crime, the oversimplification of women’s stories is not a neutral act.
Music Fade
Music Credit: Garage Band
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