ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Petina Gappah’s and Yvonne Vera’s selected texts as narratives of female criminality. Gappah’s The Book of Memory and Vera’s Under the Tongue, Without a Name and Butterfly Burning feature the theme of female criminality where criminology in general has a strong focus on female victims and has neglected women who commit crimes. It is argued that by writing about women criminals, both Gappah and Vera take a political stance and include women in a category in which they are routinely marginalized. The major argument of the chapter is that both writers use the lens of crime to highlight the various marginalized spaces that women occupy and from which they are forced to commit crimes. Nussbaum’s observation in Women and Human Development (2000) that gender inequality is an issue of justice has been found to be pertinent to an analysis of the selected texts.
