Fiction and Serial Killer: When Women Resort to Violence Authors Marina López Martínez Universitat Jaume I de Castelló Abstract This article deals with the figure of the serial killer, a character whose extreme violence has constituted it as the maximum exponent of evilness in our cultural representations. My main interest is to see the treatment that some French police novel writers reserve to him: Brigitte Aubert, Maud Tabachnik, Fred Vargas and Virginie Despentes. The cinematographic adaptation of Despente’s Baise-moi (2000) is specially revealing: while the bloodthirsty murders of Hannibal Lecter or other masculine serial killers receive the approval of the great public and the critic in general, the crimes committed by the two heroins of Virginie Despentes have been put under censorship. I try to demonstrate from this example that the use of violent women is still disturbing, a taboo after which remains old generic prejudices. Downloads PDF (Català) Published 2010-07-13 Issue No. 11 (2005): Género y cultura popular Section Dossier License The Author retains ownership of the copyright in this article, unless the opposite is expressed, and all rights not expressly granted in this agreement, including the nonexclusive right to reproduce, distribute, perform, and display the article in print or electronic form, and grants, Lectora: revista de dones i textualitat the exclusive rights to print publication of the Article for a period beginning when this Agreement is executed and ending twelve (12) months after the first publicaton of the work in this Journal. After this time, the work will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license, by which the article must be credited to the Author and the Journal be credited as first place of publication. Beginning twelve (12) months after the article´s first publication, the Author is free to enter in seperate, additional contractual agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the work as published in this journal. The Author is encouraged to post the work online (eg in institutional or subject repositories, or on their website) after the exclusivity period of twelve (12) months has expired, as it can lead to productive exchanges as well as a greater citation of the published work (see The Effect of Open Access).
