After Dunblane: Crime, Corporeality, and the (Hetero‐) Sexing of the Bodies of Men
| Author | Richard Collier |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00042 |
| Published date | 01 June 1997 |
| Date | 01 June 1997 |
The human mind is the most complex and delicately balanced of all created things.
Wisdom cannot foresee all the consequences of its sickness. The most that wisdom can
do is shield society from some of the possible consequences . . .
(Dr. Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking at the Memorial Service for
the Hungerford victims 1987).1
According to the experts [mass] killers, who are invariably male, are unlikely to be
mentally ill but are likely to have achieved very little and, as a result, harbour grudges
and resentment that can develop into violent fantasies.
(
Guardian 29 April 1996, following the murder of thirty-two people in Tasmania by
Martin Bryant)
INTRODUCTION
This article is an exploration of responses to a series of murders which in
recent years, in Britain and elsewhere, have become known as ‘lone-gunman’
or ‘spree’ killings.2The particular focus is the legal, political, criminological,
and media reception to the events which took place in Dunblane, Scotland
in March 1996 where sixteen children and their teacher were murdered, and
seventeen others injured,3by the forty-three year-old man, Thomas Hamilton.
The article will argue that the experience of the ‘lone gunman’ or ‘spree
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
* Newcastle Law School, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 22–24 Windsor
Terrace, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, England
Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the Law and Society Association Annual
Meeting, Glasgow, 1996, the Socio Legal Studies Association Annual Conference, University
of Southampton, 1996, the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Newcastle
upon Tyne, 1996, the Law School, University of Keele, November 1996, and Kent Law School,
January 1997. I would like to thank all who participated in discussion for their comments and,
in particular, the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Law and Society for their helpful
suggestions. I am indebted to conversations with Bea Campbell on aspects of the argument.
177
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 24, NUMBER 2, JUNE 1997
ISSN: 0263–323X, pp. 177–98
After Dunblane: Crime, Corporeality, and the (Hetero-)
Sexing of the Bodies of Men
RICHARD COLLIER*
killer’ is, both in its generic construction and its practice, a gendered and
distinctly masculinized phenomenon. The central aim of the article is to
(re)read the spree killing in such a way as to reposition the sexed male body
within discourses around crime. It is my intention to surface the inadequacy
of simply adding ‘men’ or ‘gender’ empirically to the study of crime by
investigating the epistemological implications of what it might mean to
theorize the masculinity/crime relation in the light of recent approaches
which have sought to dissolve the integrity of the gendered ‘identity’ of the
subject.4In so doing, I wish to explore the ways in which the (sexed) bodies
of men continue to be constituted as an ‘absent presence’ within contemporary
discourses around crime and criminality. I want to surface, that is, the
significance of sexual difference in engaging with the criminal(ized) bodies
of men in cultural and psychical terms.5
The first part of the article explores the content of press discourse
constructions of the ‘spree killing’ and, in particular, representations of the
gunman Thomas Hamilton in the aftermath of the Dunblane massacre. My
concern is with what has been ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’6within a range of ‘crimino-
legal’7constructions of the men/crime relationship. The second part of the
article explores the genealogy of this silencing of the sexed specificity of the
Dunblane massacre. In investigating the gender order of the signifying
complex which surrounds the phenomenon of the spree killing this article
is, ultimately, about Thomas Hamilton, not as a ‘monster’, ‘pervert’ or
personification of ‘evil’, but as a man.
Defining the ‘spree killing’: a note on Dunblane
There has over the last few years been an increasing fascination, reflected
in the rapid spread of the term within diverse cultural artefacts, with the
phenomenon of the ‘lone gunman’ or ‘spree killing’. The spree killing refers
to the murder of several victims over a period of minutes, hours or days in
one or more different locations ‘. . . by an impulsive killer who appears to
make little effort to evade detection . . . At completion of the sequence this
type of killer is unlikely to kill again; many commit suicide or are killed in
shootouts with the police’.8The victims of the spree killing, it has been
argued, appear to have some symbolic significance for the offender and are
killed in a ‘frenzied’ attack, whether planned in advance or on the ‘spur of
the moment’. Though details in each case differ, a number of recent murders
have been classified as examples of the spree killing. In Britain, prior to
Dunblane, the most notorious of these was the case of Michael Ryan, who
shot dead sixteen people in August 1987 in Hungerford, England.
Internationally, and within weeks of the Dunblane massacre, in April 1996
the twenty-eight year old Martin Bryant slaughtered thirty-five people in
Tasmania9in the worst spree killing on record. Opinion remains divided as
to whether the spree killing should be considered a separate form of multiple
murder.10 What is agreed, however, is that ‘almost all mass and spree
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© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997
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