A01=Lisa Downing
agency
aileen wuornos
Author_Lisa Downing
bestiality
black widow
Category=JBS
Category=JKV
celebrity
childhood
children
crime
cult following
death
dennis nilsen
desire
destruction
eq_bestseller
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
europe
evil
exceptionalism
fame
fandom
female killers
femininity
foucault
gender
genius
history
humanity
infamy
isolation
madness
marie lafarge
media
modernity
morbidity
murder
myra hindley
nonfiction
notoriety
pierre-francois lacenaire
poison
popular culture
serial killer
social norms
united states
violence
women murderers
Product details
- ISBN 9780226003405
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 2013
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The subject of murder has always held a particular fascination for us. But since at least the nineteenth century, we have seen the murderer as different from the ordinary citizen - a special individual who, like an artist or a genius, exists apart from the moral majority, a sovereign self who obeys only the destructive urge, sometimes even commanding cult followings. In contemporary culture, we continue to believe that there is something different and exceptional about killers, but is the murderer such a distinctive type? Are they degenerate beasts or supermen as they have been depicted on the page and the screen? Or are murderers something else entirely? In "The Subject of Murder", Lisa Downing explores the ways in which the figure of the murderer has been made to signify a specific kind of social subject in Western modernity. Drawing on the work of Foucault in her studies of the lives and crimes of killers in Europe and the United States, Downing interrogates the meanings of media and texts produced about and by murderers.
Upending the usual treatment of murderers as isolated figures or exceptional individuals, Downing argues that they are ordinary people, reflections of our society at the intersections of gender, agency, desire, and violence.
Lisa Downing is professor of French discourses of sexuality at the University of Birmingham, U.K. She is the author of numerous books, including Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature and The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault and coauthor of Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters.
