MARGOT LEIGH BUTLER1 [ 9 ] I’ll bet you’ve pictures of yourself, maybe images of yourself from through­out your life, photos lying loose in a box or pressed behind plastic sheets in spiral-bound albums. What if you received an invitation to donate one of your photos to an exhibition in honour of women who’d been […]

JACK BOOZER [ 8 ] Communication media dominate contemporary American life and have increasingly been recognized as constituting the most central issue in West­ern thought and culture. The power and influence of this media world have also been reflected in cinema, including an entire cycle of Hollywood prod­ucts released between 1995 and 2000, which I […]

[ 7 ] In a commentary written for the art exhibit Scene of the Crime, Ralph Rugoff highlights what he sees in contemporary art as a fascination with violence and crime and, in particular, with the residues and traces that define the foren­sic scene of violent crime. Blood stains, bodies, and the debris of violence […]

Mary Ann Doane points to the work of Annette Michelson and argues that the play of technological artifice, fear, and femininity moves feminist debates on representation beyond gender stereotyping and the “cinematic iconography of repression and desire” to a place where the feminized form is “the fantas — matic ground of cinema itself” (Doane 1990,166) […]

Unfortunately, it is very difficult today for the public to gain access to this tribute to Galileo, which is housed apart from the collection of zoological models (including the anatomical wax models housed one story above). The anatomical display of La Specola has always been open to all classes of the public (as long as […]

Studies of contemporary visualizations of the human body in medicine, espe­cially in the Visible Human Project, are relevant here (Cartwright 1998; Marchessault and Sawchuk 2000). Lisa Cartwright examines this digital rep­resentation of a male and a female body, fully dissectible and available online, in terms of the history of medical anatomical representation, and she con­cludes […]

ANNETTE BURFOOT [ 6 ] Introduction One of the main purposes of this collection is to explore the apparent differ­ence between women who kill and women who are killed. It is the contention of the editors that the distinction between these two aspects of violence is less clear than commonly perceived and is carefully mediated […]

The very excessiveness of Homolka’s transgressions raises the possibility of an alternative reading of her case based around Luce Irigaray’s ideas on mime­sis. Through its deliberate and subversive assumption of the feminine role in discourse, mimesis aims to thwart the continued subordination of women. Irigaray (1985, 75-76), in using this technique to reveal and speak […]

Further reasons for the persistent exclusion of cases like those of Karla Homolka from a feminist construction of violent female subjectivity lie in their unset­tling of pretheorized notions of femininity. Her transgression rendered overt the constructed nature of both mainstream and feminist performatives of femininity. For when dominant legal and media “scripts” called for complete […]

The main impediment to a feminist consideration of the case of Karla Homolka proceeds from the unpalatable suggestion that she may have enjoyed her crimes. This distaste does not result from her transgressions of the stereo­types of good wife and woman, as these are rarely problematic in feminist legal or cultural studies theory. However, for […]