Criminality and Femininity: Undoing the Paradox

Women involved in violent crime, both perpetrators and victims, are often vulnerable to forms of representation that distort or overwrite their experiences. Their identities can be reduced to sexist stereotypes, while their bodies are displaced, manipulated and represented in ways that reinforce these constructions. Drawing on feminist scholars such as Frances Heidensohn and concepts such as Barbara Creed’s “monstrous-feminine”, I argue that the stories told about women who perpetrate violent crime are often based on essentialist notions of gender that sit within a framework of patriarchal norms. By focusing on the Australian case of Catherine Birnie – a woman convicted of murdering four young women in Perth while under the guidance of her boyfriend – I show how news reporting functions as a tool that polices femininity by perpetuating gendered narratives of monstrosity. Through poetic biography, I present a nuanced version of Birnie, one that interrogates her dominant media portrayal and restores a sense of agency to her story. In this presentation, I explore how Birnie has been positioned by the media as “monstrous” and “deviant” in relation to her femininity and, in response, posit poetic biography as a way of interrogating and re-visioning her dominant narrative. 

Chelsea Roles is a PhD candidate at James Cook University, Townsville. Her research explores the intersection of true crime, life writing and feminist poetry. Her current project poses a feminist poetics of true crime that aims to re-mediate and re-vision dominant narratives surrounding women victims and perpetrators of crime through biographical poetry. Her poetry has been published in Sudo Journal.

Zoom: https://anu.zoom.us/j/81411217952?pwd=eU2bzOPFwhhZGiG8I9bACYIwGTxg46.1  

Meeting ID: 814 1121 7952  - Password: CALC2026