THE SUBJECT REALITY OF VIOLENT WOMEN

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine the means by which the media present feminine violence in such a way as to re-enforce the patriarchal structures most threatened by violent women's assumptions of subjectivity. By publicly stereotyping violent women, the media consistently displace the meaning of feminine violence by continuing "to perceive and portray the act of murder by women as an unnatural and isolated event." Aggression in women is, with few exceptions, always spoken of either in relation to domestic abuse, or women's sexuality, or both. Stereotyping women who kill as doing so only within one or the other of these contexts corresponds neatly to the rigidly formulaic nineteenth-century categorization of women writers that Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar outline in their book, The Madwoman in the Atticz those of the "angel" and the "monster.