ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the socio-legal purpose of representation, which is social governance. The theorising is informed by symbolic interactionism and key themes from the interactionist framework, such as intersections of interaction, biography, social structure, inter-subjectivity, interactional experience and enforced social identities, such as labelling. The audience is posited as important because it is at the receiving end of representation, and it is the audience that gives meaning to the mask: Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. The self-labelling is prevalent in the cases, where it often takes the form of perpetrator self-reproach, and in the cases it can even be seen to be a catalyst in the prelude to the killing. The chapter also examines the techniques of labelling and sympathetic reinterpretation, which are argued as pivotal to representing the perpetrator and the killing.
