ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on specific subset of women who are sentenced to death and shows that violent crimes receive a large amount of media attention. It looks at gendered behavioral assumptions through a feminist lens in order to critically analyze media narratives about women sentenced to death. The chapter examines discursive practices, or uses of language, within newspaper articles that serve to create and maintain narratives about gender and criminality. Feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (FPDA) will be used as the primary theoretical framework in this chapter in an attempt to illuminate how gendered power dynamics are perpetuated through the media's discussion of women on death row. Mira Sotirovic concludes that "conservatives are more likely to explain both crime and welfare in individualistic terms" which could potentially explain the prevalence of executions and the high levels of public support for the death penalty in the South, which tends to be more conservative.
