More Misogyny by Susan

Until I did this module I had no idea that there were so many JtR fans in the world, and that there was a multi million pound industry based on Ripperology. To me it seems sick, that a murderer should achieve this mythic status. Wanting to find out who the ripper was has fascinated certain types people over the decades, resulting in thousands of books, films, plays, songs, toys and games devoted to this icon of misogyny and brutality. It says a lot about people's warped values if they idolize serial killers.

In St-i-i-i-ll Going – The Quest for Jack the Ripper, Deborah Cameron discusses The Diary of Jack the Ripper, by Shirley Harrison. This purports to be the diary of James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant who was one of the ripper suspects. He was supposed to have been addicted to arsenic and strychnine, had mental health problems and been incensed by his wife’s adultery.
Cameron argues that labelling the ripper murders as serial killing is anachronistic and an attempt to make the acts intelligible. Feminists see serial killing as the extreme end of a continuum of sexual violence, whose less extreme manifestations are normalized by a culture structured around systematic gender inequality. Serial killers conflate lust and loathing.
Elevating ‘Jack’ to hero status is a pathological symptom of a certain type of masculinity that is part of a patriarchal culture.
Profiling serial killers is supposed to show their radical ‘otherness’ but instead, because profiling is empirical, it just stresses the killers ‘normality’.

Serial killers who blame their mothers/ society/ unhappy childhoods etc. are just avoiding responsibility for their actions.

The JtR nostalgia reduces female victims to objects, so that the killer can be the subject. The Ripperologists are helping to perpetuate female subjugation.

St-i-i-i-ll Going…The Quest for Jack the Ripper.
Deborah Cameron
Social Text, No. 40 (Autumn 1994), pp. 147-154.
www.jstor.org/stable/466799