“Instead of Pumping Iron, She was Pumping Bullets into her Husband”: The Portrayal of a Female Perpetrator in Nanette Burstein’s Killer Sally

Abstract

In the media, the law, and public opinion, women who resort to violence within abusive relationships are often depicted as either victims or monsters. Nanette Burstein’s three-part docuseries, Killer Sally (2022), reexamines this binary which focuses on Sally McNeil, a former professional bodybuilder who murdered her husband, also a professional bodybuilder, in Southern California in 1995. Drawing on Belinda Morrissey’s When Women Kill and The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies, this article argues that Burstein questions the discursive, performative, and one-sided dimensions of media and legal portrayals of female perpetrators. By placing both the perpetrator and the victim within complex socio-psychological and posthuman frameworks, Burstein broadens the discourse on battered women who kill by granting the perpetrator agency and voice.