Violent Female Avengers in Popular Culture

Abstract

The criminal woman occupies an anomalous cultural position. Not only does she transgress society’s legal codes, she also transgresses its norms of gender as the active flouting of rule and convention that criminality entails is perceived as at odds with feminine passivity. This conception of the female criminal as ‘doubly deviant’, a term coined by Heidensohn (1996), is now well established within criminology. Heidensohn explains that the effect of double deviance is to stigmatise women in the criminal justice system and to leave them open to harsh punishment. The significance of her thesis is in highlighting how feminist criminologists need to pay attention not only to the formal social controls that can be imposed on women by the criminal justice system, but also the informal social controls regulated by constructions of normative gender. These informal social controls are of course more widely experienced as they extend into other areas of social life such as the workplace, leisure activities and interpersonal relationships.