Lynda Hart

Fatal Women traces how the violent lesbian became a recognisable figure in courtrooms, psychoanalysis and the theatre, from nineteenth-century case studies through the trials that made newspapers to films and plays of the nineteen nineties, and argues that the aggression was attached to the sexuality on purpose. Hart taught English and performance studies at the University of Pennsylvania and also wrote about performance art and about sadomasochism as theatre. The book is academic and specific, published in 1994, and it is still cited by people arguing about how the law imagines women who kill. She died in 2000.