Masculinities, Intimate Femicide and The Death Penalty in Australia, 1890-1920

Abstract

Studies of intimate femicide typically frame men as problems—the men who are violent toward female intimates, and those who fail to treat their violence seriously. Such an analytical approach evokes the question: why do men sometimes punish other men, particularly in periods when men alone served as jurors, judges, and legislators? Based on a study of 64 capital convictions in New South Wales, Australia, between 1890 and 1920, this paper examines how the prosecution and punishment of femicide delineated hierarchies of masculinity, between the power‐holding males, who evaluated criminal acts, and the men they convicted: cuckolds, spurned suitors, brutes and menaces to society. Thus it provides a fully gendered account of intimate femicide, one that takes selective masculine punitiveness as seriously as it analyses masculine mercifulness.

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