ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we employ the methods of critical discourse analysis to investigate the media coverage of a woman who killed her abusive partner. Consistent with other research on media representations of battered women who kill their abusive partners, we show that the media’s portrayal fails to capture the complexities of intimate partner violence and the fact that many battered women kill their abusive partners in self-defence. Our analysis supports Noh et al.’s (2010) findings regarding the “mad/bad” depictions of battered women who kill, but, as a linguistically oriented discourse analysis, it also offers a new perspective on such findings. That is, our ability, given our access to the transcripts of the police interview, to assess the veracity of the media’s recontextualisations of the defendant’s police interview – a big part of the media coverage – means that we have been able to demonstrate clearly how such recontextualisations can differ from their original interactions in “rhetorically consequential ways” (Attenborough, 2014).
