COOKING UP CRIMES AND MATERNAL MISDEMEANOURS
The subject of Catherine Bell’s recent work is confronting. Bell’s audacity to speak the unspeakable and put onto the agenda a subject with which we have been ill-equipped to deal strikes with a hard blow. The violent crimes committed by women against children and other women are conventionally treated with an ineffectual brew of silence and collective anxiety. According to Bell, ‘these crimes tend to evoke fear in public consciousness because these women cross the boundaries of normalised and normalising rules and roles when they kill. When women commit an offence they not only contravene the female stereotype but they challenge the capabilities associated with being female’.1 Violent women and mothers contradict inscriptions of femininity as nurturing, selfless and passive. As such, they are made abject—mythologised as mad or monstrous and expelled from the social body in an attempt to fortify the boundaries of female morality, sexuality and maternity. The result is that we are left with no language through which to comprehend their criminal acts.
These issues of violence, criminality, femininity and representation are explored in a number of Bell’s performance works and inform her PhD research. Special Delivery (2005) is inspired by a crime committed by Lisa Montgomery, a Kansas mother of two, who in 2004 was charged with strangling the pregnant Bobbie Jo Stinnett, stealing the baby from her womb and attempting to pass it off as her own child. The focus of Special Delivery is on nine cakes—each one made by Bell for every day of the exhibition. Bell uses a cake tin designed for the celebration of births and baptisms and meticulously ices each cake with the image of a cute, plump baby. However... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline