Gender-deviancy and crime: an American fantasy

E. Ingebretsen

The political usefulness of such terms as "domesticity" has changed since the 1950s. Nonetheless, some elements have remained stable over the decades. Of particular interest is the continued use of fear in public representations to create and to stabilize the domestic space. This essay considers several crime narratives of domestic intrusion, written at succesive points in this period, and concludes with the Andrew Cunanan coverage, examining how different narratives of criminal intimacy exploit similar codes of failed gender. The essay argues that the crisis announced by the serial killer is less about killing than about the perceived disarray of cultural intimacies and the collapse of the public/private binary that these govern.