‘The Man‐Woman Murderer’: Sex Fraud, Sexual Inversion and the Unmentionable ‘Article’ in 1920s Australia

Ford, Ruth

doi:10.1111/1468-0424.00175

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

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“…325-327) Such a trial occurred at the nexus of what Wallace has called an "anxiety over women's changing role [as] part of a wider sense of social transition and division, of class as well as gender" (2000, p. 11). Trial notes and reports are reproduced in Smith's text, often reflecting attempts by the prosecution to paint Crawford as a sexual deviant -a "man-woman murderer" and a monster (Ford, 2000) -and functioning as what Gallagher calls "a metaphor of our human tendency to gawk" (2017).…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing justice: Gender, genre and crime in recent historical biofictions from Australia

Padmore

Gardiner

2022

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In this essay we analyse three recent historical novels from Australia that take as their focus figures who transcend normative gender boundaries in some way, either through their possible criminal activity and/or their sexuality or gender identity: Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites (2013), about Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in Iceland; Sarah Schmidt’s See What I Have Done (2017), about the infamous Lizzie Borden; and Pip Smith’s Half Wild (2017), about the many identities of Harry Crawford. In tandem with the novels, we examine interviews and other authorial paratexts to address a number of key questions: What drew the authors to render these historical figures in fiction? What ethical or creative challenges do such portrayals present for writers and readers? What cultural work is performed by each novel? We argue that the novels’ use of indeterminacy and multiplicity as formal techniques demonstrates their authors’ commitment to feminist and revisionist interventions. Interrogating the nexus of gender and criminality as portrayed in these novels sheds light on contemporary interests in characters whose lives seem to subvert the expectations of gender identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%