Title: The return of the female serial killer – Trouble and Strife
Headings: The return of the female serial killer
The return of the female serial killer 2
Mythologizing murder
The female serial killer: monster, victim or psychopath?
Joanna Dennehy’s story
The question of sex
Becoming a hero
Cognitive dissonance
The sexual politics of serial killing

Content: The label ‘psychopath’ has a long history of being applied to sadistic killers, but it has never been much of an explanation for their crimes. There are many people who fit the clinical profile of a psychopath in the general population: rather than becoming violent criminals, some make successful careers in fields like high finance, where traits like amorality, risk-taking and lack of empathy are helpful rather than dysfunctional. But the suggestion that psychopathy is more relevant to Joanna Dennehy’s story than gender is interesting for another reason. Though the term ‘psychopath’ is formally gender inclusive, it tends to conjure up a male prototype. The behaviours and qualities we associate with psychopaths, such as rule-breaking, risk-taking, emotional coldness and insensitivity to others’ feelings, are all culturally coded as masculine. Manifested in less extreme forms, they are actually considered ‘normal’ qualities for men to exhibit—but not for women, which is one reason why women who do exhibit them tend to be demonized as ‘worse than men’. Arguably, insisting that Joanna Dennehy should be thought of as a ‘psychopath’ rather than a ‘female serial killer’ is not so much a de-gendering as a re-gendering of her crimes, a way of masculinising her without using explicitly gendered language. It avoids the usual tendency to make a female killer’s femaleness the only important thing about her, but it does so at the cost of obscuring her femaleness entirely. Later on I will say why I think this strategy was found necessary in Dennehy’s case.