Mainstream media and legal discourses responded to innuendoes of Karla Homolka’s possible sadism in a typically hysterical manner. On the one hand, they vilified her, considering her inhumanly evil and more wicked than her male partner;16 on the other hand, they hurriedly scrambled to rewrite her tale as one of loving self-sacrifice, or, in other […]

This brief narration of the “facts” of this case depict Karla Homolka as, at the very least, a spectator of her male partner’s rapes and murders of young girls. However, her own account attests that her involvement went far beyond voyeurism, making overt her active and sadistic participation. The politics of Karla Homolka’s specularity was […]

This chapter draws upon psychoanalytic theory to attempt to discover reasons for the particular treatment, or lack thereof, the Homolka case received from mainstream and feminist legal and media discourses. Psychoanalysis seems most apposite to the study of this case as several of the narrations of the behav­iour of Karla Homolka echo Freud’s articulation of […]

BELINDA MORRISSEY [ 5 ] Feminism’s “Limit” Case In 2002, shortly before Karla Homolka’s proposed release from prison, an Internet site called “Karla Homolka Death Pool: When the Game Is Over, We All Win” was set up solely for the purpose of taking its visitors’ bets on the exact date that someone would murder Homolka […]

In the early 1980s there was a shift of focus in feminist thinking from concern with the concept of “woman” to a concern with the concept of “gender” (Brasher 1999). With this shift, feminist theorists began defining gender as a socially constructed category that encompassed sex rather than constructing sex as a biological condition that […]

In the months preceding her execution, Karla was seen by tv audiences coast to coast. Nationally syndicated columnists took up her cause and reporters dropped everything to interview her. Once her execution became imminent, the prison received more than 300 phone calls a week about her. During that time Karla spoke with a number of […]

The 1998 execution of Karla Faye Tucker provided us with the first “almost — televised” execution in history. There was so much media coverage (leading up to the actual execution day) that, by the time it arrived, most of us felt we knew Karla intimately.5 The extent of this coverage was partly because she was […]

Historically, public executions, especially the executions of women, were always a draw (Gatrell 1994). During the late 1800s and early 1900s the day of an exe­cution was considered a time for social gathering. Flyers were posted, invita­tions sent out, and discussions held about how to accommodate a multitude of dignitaries. It was considered fashionable to […]

KATHLEEN O’SHEA [ 4 ] It’s 8:oo pm and unseasonably warm for December. The night is calm. The stars are bright. The moon is almost full. Except for two groups of people and a wrought iron sign like one you might see over a cemetery gate, there is little to indicate we have just arrived […]

So far, we might tentatively conclude that Derrida and Marks are attempting to unsettle whatever established ideas we might have held about the nature of truth, the transparency of linguistic and documentary forms of communica­tion, the political nature of discourses and other forms of representation, and advocate for ways in which we might “trouble” these […]