ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how this conflict has parallels in recent feminist legal scholarship, which has debated the implications for women of sexed evaluative standards. It aims to re-evaluate the implications for women, and abused women in particular, of the sexed standard now codified in the new defence of loss of control, in light of this sophisticated feminist legal scholarship. It would mean abandoning the justificatory element of loss of control, losing the sense that what D did was understandable according to common moral values. Of course, one might argue that to focus attention on explicitly sexed evaluative standards misses the point; gender stereotyping permeates every part of the criminal justice process irrespective of the existence of specific sexed evaluative standards in individual criminal defences. The chapter argues that the priority given to sex and gender in the current evaluative schema of the loss of control defence encourages an analysis tied to questionable legal generalisations of womanhood.
