Mother, Monster, Mrs, I: A critical evaluation of gendered naming strategies in English sentencing remarks of women who kill

Potts, Amanda ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4598-6577 and Weare, Siobhan 2018. Mother, Monster, Mrs, I: A critical evaluation of gendered naming strategies in English sentencing remarks of women who kill. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 31 (1) , pp. 21-52. 10.1007/s11196-017-9523-z

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Abstract

In this article, we take a novel approach to analysing English sentencing remarks in cases of women who kill. We apply computational, quantitative, and qualitative methods from corpus linguistics to analyse recurrent patterns in a collection of English Crown Court sentencing remarks from 2012 to 2015, where a female defendant was convicted of a homicide offence. We detail the ways in which women who kill are referred to by judges in the sentencing remarks, providing frequency information on pronominal, nominative, and categorising naming strategies. In discussion of the various patterns of preference both across and within these categories (e.g. pronoun vs. nomination, title + surname vs. forename + surname), we remark upon the identities constructed through the references provided. In so doing, we: (1) quantify the extent to which members of the judiciary invoke patriarchal values and gender stereotypes within their sentencing remarks to construct female defendants, and (2) identify particular identities and narratives that emerge within sentencing remarks for women who kill. We find that judges refer to women who kill in a number of ways that systematically create dichotomous narratives of degraded victims or dehumanised monsters. We also identify marked absences in naming strategies, notably: physical identification normally associated with narrativization of women’s experiences; and the first person pronoun, reflecting omissions of women’s own voices and narratives of their lived experiences in the courtroom.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General) K Law > KD England and Wales P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Publisher:	Springer Verlag (Germany)
ISSN:	0952-8059
Related URLs:	https://link.springer.com/article/10.100...
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	12 September 2017
Date of Acceptance:	14 August 2017
Last Modified:	03 May 2023 02:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/104295

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