Criminalising vulnerability: Protecting ‘vulnerable’ children and punishing ‘wicked’ mothers

This article aims to uncover how, in attempting to ameliorate the vulnerability of children, the offence of ‘causing or allowing the death of the child’ criminalises abused mothers. It explores how, in the courtroom, tropes of female criminality and constructs of the ‘bad’ mother are mobilised in ways that are both gendered and ‘classed’. The effect is to silence female defendants, deprive their actions of context, and deny them agency. This argument has implications for assessing the moral and legal culpability of abused women who fail to protect their children, because it shifts the focus onto how the abuser has exploited and exacerbated the vulnerability of both mother and child. This approach also challenges law’s preoccupation with scrutinising (and punishing) women who do not adhere to a glorified, middle class ideal of motherhood. More broadly, by focusing on the context of a woman’s alleged ‘failure’, there opens a space within legal discourse to refute the characterisation of female criminality as being either ‘mad’ or ‘bad’, and of women who engage in criminal behaviour as being either ‘virgins’ or ‘whores’. Finally, in focusing on vulnerability as a universal and unavoidable part of the human experience, gendered assumptions of autonomy and the self/other dichotomy are challenged

Communicating via clothes

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The effects of concert dress and physical appearance on perceptions of female solo performers

  This study investigates the importance of visual information in performance, focusing on the influence of dress on the musical evaluation of female classical soloists. In this study, four female violinists were filmed playing in four states of dress: jeans, a nightclubbing dress, black concert dress and point-light condition (body movement is apparent but not physical appearance). Each clip was recorded in two conditions: both as the performer's own version and with a mastertrack dubbed over the top. The dubbed versions therefore had a constant musical soundtrack. Fifteen male and 15 female musicians (age range 17-66 years) were asked to rate clips on six point scales in terms of technical proficiency, musicality, appropriateness of dress and attractiveness of performer. Significant effects were found of condition, dress and performer, and an interaction of performer and dress was observed on participant perceptions. Implications of these perceptions of female performers suggest that observers have a strong concept of what constitutes appropriate dress for a female recitalist, as the concert dress was overwhelmingly favoured above the nightclubbing dress and jeans. There is evidence that the historical dominance of mental attributes over physical attributes continues, as performer 3 is rated high for technical proficiency and musicality, but lower for appropriateness of dress.   

Theorizing the Young Woman in the Body

In the last decade attention has been given in the media and in medical and psychological texts to young women’s unhappy and unhealthy relationships with their bodies. In 1999 the author undertook qualitative research on contemporary western young women, with identity and appearance issues as its major focus (Frost, 2001). However, the concern of this article is not with the empirical research per se (this is discussed elsewhere, e.g. Frost, 2004) but with the examination of the theoretical model which informed the research. It argues that by utilizing interactionist, structural and post-structural theory a framework of understanding was established against which the complex and ambivalent experiences of young women inhabiting their appearances could be understood, and to which the empirical research contributed a further dimen-sion. Initially the article gives some consideration to the imperative of personal display for all subjects of late consumer capitalism, drawing primarily on inter-actionist theories of the body as a site of visual presentation. To interrogate the gendered nature of body experience it then harnesses Foucauldian feminist approaches. A structuralist frame of reference is deployed to understand th