The abolition of capital punishment as a feminist issue
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78 the abolition of capital
punishment as a feminist issue Laura Huey On 11 January 2001, the state of Oklahoma executed Wanda Jean Allen. As a killer – she murdered her former lover in an apparent fit of jealousy and despair – she was unremarkable. As a ‘regular’ citizen of the state before the commission of her crime, she would likely have attracted little public attention – she was poor, black, female, lesbian, and had an IQ that tested in the range of 80 (Kirby, 2001). Her execution certainly drew little attention; there was no large public outcry against her death, and none of the media frenzy that attended the execution of Karla Faye Tucker some two years earlier. In trying to understand Allen’s death, and the public’s reaction to this event, or, more appropriately, lack of reaction, I have been questioning the roles that race, gender, socio-economic status, and sexuality played in how we – the general public – understood and accepted this event. Undoubtedly, we can trace such connections, and they are worthy of exploration; however, in reflecting upon this event what has struck me most noticeably is less the public’s apathy towards understanding Allen’s death, and those of similar others enacted through ritualized violence, but the lack of discussion of these events within feminist circles. For example, in reviewing the literature on capital punishment in the US, I could locate very few recent works on the subject by feminist scholars. Of those few that I did find, their content seemed singularly focused on what is a narrowly framed research question: ‘to what extent do gender constructs play a role in the receipt and/or execution of a death sentence?’ (Rapaport, 1991; Laster, 1994; Carroll, 1997; Cruikshank, 1999; Heberle, 1999; O’Neill, 1999; Farr, 2000). In short, of late, we feminists don’t seem to want to talk about capital punishment or its abolition. Thus, my purpose here is to respond to what is both present and absent in the feminist literature on the death penalty in order to open a much-needed discussion of this subject among feminist scholars, researchers and activists. In doing so, I am posing a question to you, the reader: ‘is the abolition of capital punishment a feminist issue?’ As I argue throughout, to the extent that the death penalty clearly offends the values and goals that we hold dear, this is a question that can only be answered in the affirmative.
feminist review 78 2004 c 2004 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/04 $30 www.feminist-review.com (175–180)
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so why aren’t we talking about capital punishment? One possible explanation for our relative silence on the subject of capital punishment can be found in Cruikshank’s (1999) discussion of the gendered politics that took place surrounding the execution of Karla Faye Tucker. Cruikshank (1999: 1117) offers the following reason for her own abstention from taking a public stand on abolition: ‘Much as I would like to be able to persuade the reader that capital punishment is wrong, any moral or humanist argument that I might make about the
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