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104 Feminist Review

stood to be the cause of women's ills. The resulting situation throws up a cycle of establishment, crisis and reformation deriving from the clash between radical vision and insti­tutional opportunity. The beginning of the crisis for an individual centre is, as Broom shows, likely to be the point at which some women say that the centre is no longer fulfilling the objectives which led to its estab­lishment. In the ensuing debate be­tween 'radicals' and 'reformists', two issues emerge as central: the con­stituency of women such a centre is designed to serve, and how to ensure accountability to this constituency. It is hard to escape the conclusion that it is the process of achieving success within the system - be­coming institutionalized - that de­radicalizes; it is even harder to work out how this depressing fate can be avoided, and there is little in Broom's book that provides anything in the way of clues.

Broom's data come from the forty or so existing women's health centres around the country, inter­views with more than 120 women involved in the provision of women's

Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation Edited by Helen Birch Virago: London 1993, ISBN 185381198x £8.99 Pbk

Like many others I was caught up in two macabre stories of murderous women during the end of May 1993. The first was the case of Mandy Jordache, the abused wife in Brook­side who finally snapped and killed her crazy husband. The second, more prominently and chillingly, was the case of Beverley Allitt, convicted of murdering four children consigned to her care in a Lincolnshire hospital. These figures each seem to exemplify very different aspects of women, of representation and of murder: the

health care, and numerous files, archives and personal documents. The book is part history, part so­ciology, part auto/biography, part feminist 'tract'. In this sense it fits well the non-disciplinary model of women's writing according to which there is nothing improper about doing all of these things at the same time. But, while Broom's sociological insights - her sharp-witted analysis of just what happens to radical understandings of women's health needs when confined within main­stream institutional power struc­tures - serve as a sensible frame­work within which to fit her narrative; in the end it is the histori­cal task the book accomplishes that is most valuable. Feminism itself goes through cycles of estab­lishment, crisis and reformation or apparent disappearance. Thus, while feminism still exists (and so, even more, do feminisms) we have now passed into the era in which writing the history of 'second wave' feminism has become an important way of holding on to it.

Ann Oakley

first a victim who suddenly turns nasty to protect her children, the second an incomprehensible figure who can only be defined by an exotic and bizarre condition - 'Mun­chausen's syndrome by proxy'- and whose deeds are the more terrifying for exploiting and overturning that ultimate image of maternal, caring femininity - the children's nurse. Yet both have been portrayed with a kind of gothic intensity. In Brook­side, the complex of events leading up to the murder was overtaken by the melodramatic problem of how to dispose of the body, pungently oc­cupying 'the extension', and the sus­pense of waiting to see whether all will be revealed. The Allitt case plays on a more fundamental fear, as the hospital, the supposed place of safety, is transformed into a theatre

of horror, not simply through the actions of one pathological individ­ual, but through the negligence, carelessness and lack of resources that allowed this to go so long undetected by the health authorities.

Moving Targets, Helen Birch's ambitious collection, provides an important framework to think about these cases and the complex set of often difficult questions they raise for feminists. The book itself draws on a range of different paradigms and modes of analysis (it is not only the target which moves but also the means of spotting it) all of which circle round a set of key questions, while defining them very differently. What are the interconnexions between ideologies of murder and of femininity? Are women becoming more violent, and does this violence manifest itself as a breaking-down of gender roles, or is women's path­ology always constructed as a sign of their femininity? What is the signifi­cance of the recent spate of films featuring different forms of female murderers and serial killers: Basic Instinct, Black Widow, Thelma and Louise and Fatal Attraction among them? In different ways these essays each reject the notion that violence is fundamentally male and that women are always its victims, instead exploring the intricate ways in which violence can be reproduced within and by subordinate groups as ways of resisting or gaining power. Some tread carefully around the vexed issues of agency and responsi­bility. Definitions and perceptions of women killers might always be bound up with their gender, and might always be woven into some moral fable that is extended to women in general, but does this mean that we shouldn't accord women the 'right' to be seen as responsible for their deeds? Or are perceptions already so loaded that this would become yet another kind of privatization of dominant values? 'Because women have traditionally internalized their feelings of anger

Reviews 105

or injustice, does this mean that we have to pathologize those who do not?' asks Helen Birch in her Introduction.

The essays are written from dif­ferent national perspectives (though they are all taken from Europe, North America and Australia) as well as contrasting intellectual standpoints, and this adds to the scope of the collection. For example, Nicole Ward Jouve's fascinating account ofthe Papin sisters, incestu­ous lovers, two servant girls of Le Mans who brutally murdered their women employers, explores the iconic role that the case played in French intellectual life in the 1930s and after (it was discussed by de Beauvoir, by Lacan, and was trans­formed in Genet's The Maids) and reads the narrative through and be­yond these accounts. She critically deconstructs the interpretative frameworks through which the case has been rendered by investigating the crucial role which metaphors of vision play throughout - the sisters put out the eyes of their employers and, in so doing, distort the vision of those who would explain them, would try to turn them into existen­tial heroines. Helen Birch, too, looks at a notorious female criminal -Myra Hindley - as renarrativized cultural icon, drawing on Kristeva's conception of abjection to analyse the persistence of the tropes through which she is portrayed. Briar Wood and Deb Verhoeven each analyse notorious Australian cases - that of Lindy Chamberlain and the 'dingo baby murder' case that reverberated through Australia throughout the 1980s, and that of Tracey Wigginton, the infamous 'lesbian vampire killer' whose trial coincided with the Gulf War. The analysis of the Wigginton case was fascinating but the attempt to link it with 'Operation Desert Storm' was rather strained and un­convincing, I felt.

The second half of the volume draws more extensively on work in feminist social policy, psychiatry and

106 Feminist Review

criminology. Melissa Benn's excel­lent piece on the sexual politics of PMT, like Nicole Ward Jouve's essay, draws on de Beauvoir's existentialist notion of 'bad faith' to explain the way in which the concept of PMT is used to rationalize and marginalize anger or desperation. PMT, Benn argues, 'represents the ultimate denial of agency', disem­powering women by confronting them with a split, Jekyll and Hyde image of themselves. Lorraine Rad­ford's research on the position of 'battered women who kill' could have been used directly to construct the fictional Jordache case and argues for fundamental shifts in legal defi­nitions - of 'provocation', 'self­defence', etc., if the law is not to be skewed - as it has been in the case of Sarah Thornton - for women who become convinced that murder is their only refuge. The volume con­cludes with a study of the Lainz hospital murders in Austria, where, as in the Beverley Allitt case, under­paid and underqualified nurses found themselves in positions of power through the inadequate

Inversions: Writings by Dykes, Queers and Lesbians Edited by Betsy War land Open Letters: London 1992, ISBN 1 85789 020 5£11.99

New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings Edited by Sally Munt Harvester Wheatsheaf: Hemel Hempstead 1992, ISBN 0 74501166 7 £40.00 Hbk; ISBN 0 74501167 5 £10.95 Pbk Lesbian writing is the base of both these collections; Inversions from the producers' perspective, New Lesbian Criticism from the consumers'. The consumers' perspective has more postmodern mileage, but the authors in Inversions- poets and novelists in

resources of the health service, and an analysis offemale serial killers.

The obvious trap awaiting a vol­ume of this kind is that it will repro­duce the very exoticism and sen­sationalism of the representations it is analysing. On the whole Moving Targets avoids this - though I felt that some of the essays were rather repetitive and could have spent more time contextualizing their dis­cussions. With the exception of the Papin sisters, the essays were all on contemporary cases, giving a rather misleading impression that crimes of violence by women and the scandal­ized media response to them is a modem phenomenon. An analysis of, for example, nineteenth-century causes celebres (such as the case of Madelaine Smith, accused of poi­soning her lover in 1857, the case eventually being found 'not proven'), or other historical cases would have given weight to this book, but as it stands it is still a vital mapping of a complicated and difficult terrain.

Jenny Bourne Taylor

the main- sound a concerted riposte against their supposed postmodem demise, and a totalizing theme for both collections is what lesbian writing means to and for the 'lesbian community'. Unsurprisingly, since the Inversions authors are concemed with subjective experience as the validation of their authorial voice, this collection tends towards what Gillian Spragg calls 'expressive real­ism' - literature as a means of com­municating truths about life. As Minnie Bruce Pratt says: 'The first time I read my poetry publicly and as a lesbian, the woman who said to me "Write more. I want to know what happens next."'

Many of the Inversions authors describe the profound impact they have seen their work have on lesbian readers and listeners. At the same time, many bemoan the lack of