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

Hatice Bay

doi:10.31178/INTER.12.26.4

Autori

Hatice Bay Cappadocia University Autor

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31178/INTER.12.26.4

Cuvinte cheie:

female perpetrator, battered women, Sally McNeil, Ray McNeil, Nanette Burstein, Killer Sally

Rezumat

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.

Biografie autor

Hatice Bay, Cappadocia University

Hatice Bay is currently an Instructor in the Department of Translation and Interpreting (English) at Cappadocia University, Turkey. She studied English Literature at METU, Turkey, and graduated with a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research focuses on literary urban studies, contemporary American literature, and literary theory. Her current publications include, “Indigenerdity and STEM in Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley” in PopMeC Research Blog, “The Ocean as a Black Utopian Space: Rivers Solomon’s The Deep” in Bodies of Water in African American Fiction & Film, and “African Ecofeminist Environmentalism in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were” in Stratified Nature: In Women’s Writing Past, Present, and Future with Cambridge Scholars Publishing.