Document Type
Book Section
Publication Date
3-2014
ISBN
978-1-4438-5501-3
Abstract
This chapter explores feminist jurisprudence regarding women who commit acts of violence, focusing specifically on questions of agency in neonaticide (killing a newborn). A case study approach illustrates the debate in feminist theory between same-treatment and different-treatment of women as compared to men. While some feminist criminologists urge that women who kill must be viewed the same as men (as having agency and responsibility), other feminists question this approach and point out that women who commit crimes that intersect with family law receive disproportionately harsh treatment and should be treated differently than men.
This chapter contends that the paradox raised by the sameness versus difference approach may be side-stepped by analyzing the issue through Martha Fineman’s rhetoric of the vulnerable subject. Sharing parallels with kairos of the Sophists, Fineman’s rhetoric of vulnerability provides a pragmatic lens through which to examine laws concerning neonaticide and to argue for changes to these laws as well as for changes in the availability of state resources to provide women who have committed neonaticide with resilience.
First Page
83
Last Page
97
Num Pages
15
Publisher
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Place
Newcastle, UK
Rights
Copyright © 2014. Cambridge Scholars Publisher & the authors. All rights reserved.
Editor
Kirsti Cole
Book Title
Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics? Locations, Scholarship, Discourse
Recommended Citation
Susan Ayres,
When Women Kill Newborns: The Rhetoric of Vulnerability,
in
Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics? Locations, Scholarship, Discourse
83
(Kirsti Cole eds., 2014).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/1066
Included in
Criminal Law Commons, Family Law Commons, Law and Society Commons