Sad in Legal
The creation of a narrative based on the discourse of the pathological “crazy” woman killing her child(ren) reflects and reinforces the existing socio-legal and gender discourse that constructs women as irrational, emotionally abnormal, and as “in need of psychiatric help more than men” [6:20]. The use of language in both law and jurisprudence, which focuses on mental abnormality, imbalance and disorder, unsurprisingly constructs a macro-narrative of female infanticide as “crazy.” In this macronarrative, there is no room for competing micronarratives, the semantics of some lexical decisions in infanticide cases focusing almost exclusively on mental illness and the imbalance of the accused. Thus, the main concern in constructing “crazy” women is not that these women are discursively constructed as “crazy” per se. On the contrary, they are constructed as “crazy” in a macronarrative that does not allow the emergence of micronarratives that examine their circumstances more completely, but automatically pathologize their actions and thus deny their ability to act. The prevalence and penetration of socially constructed norms into the mandate of motherhood means that when women kill their children, “they pose a profound challenge to accepted notions of motherhood and the protection mothers offer to their children” [5:585]. I now turn to the legal response to these gendered deviations, in particular the critical examination of the macronarratives that arise in cases that construct discursively dominant identities for filicidal women who deny their capacity to act. Even the financial compensation is not what it used to be. Oversupply of lawyers, availability of well-trained paralegals, use of foreign lawyers, and computerized discovery have reduced salaries. While the cost of living has risen by 15% over the past six years, the average lawyer`s salary has dropped by 13%. The intelligence, dynamism and legal knowledge of lawyers increase their chances of success in all kinds of professions.
The former jurists have often become: the discursive construction of this singular “bad” narrative identity is an attempt in legal discourse to remove the challenge that these murderous women pose to an appropriate femininity dictated by gender discourse, and in particular to the understanding of motherhood. However, by creating a dominant identity centered on monstrous, non-human mythology, not only are these gender norms reinforced, but socio-legal discourse does not explicitly recognize the ability of all women and mothers to choose to be violent towards their children and ultimately kill them. Such an approach deprives not only these “bad” filicidal women, but also all women of the ability to act. However, when this hyper-agency is combined with the macro-narrative of these “bad” women as non-women, non-humans, monsters, further analysis shows that the agency`s denial is still ongoing. Although the agency is recognized, more precisely the hyper-agency, the agent and the type of agency are not recognizable as women or humans. The “perpetrator behind the act” in the cases of “nasty” filicidal women is not the woman herself, but the non-human monster constructed as her dominant identity in the legal narrative. The agent here is the non-human monster constructed by the macro-narrative of the case, not the filicidal woman herself. This explains the hyper-agency, evident in judicial language: women are not able to be hyperagents because of the male sexuation of the legal subject and therefore their status as “objects” in legal discourse [36]. Hyper-agency is therefore not attributed to the accused themselves, but to the non-human mythical creatures into which they are transformed.
Therefore, in cases of “bad” women who kill their children, it is not these women as mothers or even as women or people who have chosen to act. On the contrary, in the context of their singular narrative identities, they have acted as non-feminine inhuman monsters. They did not act as human women, but as monstrous creatures whose humanity was rejected. Thus, “bad” filicidal women are deprived of their freedom of choice as women and as human beings. Before beginning a critical analysis of each of the discursively constructed identities of the “bad”, “crazy” and “sad” filicidal woman, it is necessary to take note of the language and terminology used in this article. The term “filicide” is commonly used to refer to the act of a mother killing her child. In contrast, the term “infanticide” is only used here in its legal sense in relation to the specific offence/defence of infanticide found in the criminal law of England and Wales (discussed in more detail later in the article). Finally, it is necessary to explain the mechanisms of the term agency, which is defined here as follows: the ability of an individual to choose or behave in a particular way [35:338]. Specifically, when we talk about agency refusals, it is the active refusal of the agency that occurs and is therefore mentioned. This is because the discursive construction of a singular and dominant narrative identity is a positive and “active” act of doing for these women.
On the other hand, there are the passive refusals to act resulting from the continuous male sexuation of the legal subject and the construction of women as legal objects, to which the discourse of criminal law reacts [36: 7]. Because of these women`s status as objects whose free will is passively denied, the narratives of “crazy,” “bad,” and “sad” women can discursively construct new dominant identities for them that actively deny their ability to act.