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: Whereas Joanna Dennehy inspired a slew of articles with titles like ‘Inside the mind of the female serial killer’, and ‘What makes a female serial killer tick?’, no one would call an article ‘Inside the mind of the male serial killer’. The serial killer is male by default: his maleness is both taken for granted and glossed over in the stories told to explain his behaviour. That observation was the starting point for a book I wrote with Elizabeth Frazer in the 1980s, The Lust to Kill. In it we explored the relationship of what was then more commonly called ‘sexual murder’ to certain forms of masculinity, and asked why that connection was so rarely made in either ‘folk’ or ‘expert’ accounts. We were interested not only in the phenomenon of sexual murder itself, but also in the stories told to explain it. Those stories are revealing about a culture’s sexual politics, its habitual ways of thinking about gender, power, sex and violence. Joanna Dennehy’s case is interesting because it challenges our assumptions about the way those things fit together. The female serial killer: