ABSTRACT
Ross uses the so-called Yorkshire Ripper’s crimes and trial to display the danger and pathology of “an entire social logic based on the necessity of predicating men and women as fixed social categories.” The court’s ruling on Sutcliffe’s apparent confusion about whether he was out to kill all women or on a divine mission to kill just prostitutes is taken by Ross as a way of demonstrating the twin ills of essentializing and totalizing. He argues that in finding Sutcliffe “sane” (meaning that he was out to kill all women and not just prostitutes), that in finding Sutcliffe not “mad” but just “bad,” the law chooses to resolve the conflict by reaffirming the very “logic of universals that holds sway in the realm of social action that produces the likes of Sutcliffe.”
