Chapter Five attempts to draw out some strategies of visual activism, or resistant spectatorship from the figure of the blind character. Leaning on analyses of staring in disability studies and Black feminist philosophy, it argues that looking back is not only a retrospective gaze but also an activist one. Plays by Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, Peter Rose, John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, Henry Chettle and John Day, and others are at the core of this chapter, as well as other paratexts for discourses on the ethics of spectating (including, for instance, Judith Butler and Susan Sontag’s writing on the ethics of looking at photographs of torture). The chapter concludes that spectatorship needs to divest itself of a view-from-nowhere model and move towards a situated view-from-somewhere model, that emphasises its partiality and its accountability.

For some, part of the attraction of lust killing is the opportunity to pose wearing the clothes of their victims. For the two discussed here, this would seem to be a dominant paraphilia. Both men showed evidence suggesting a role of stress in their killing. Commander of the largest military base in Canada, Colonel Russell Williams would seem to be a most unlikely sexual serial killer, particularly since his victims were women under his command. Williams graduated to killing via breaking into homes and stealing pairs of underwear. He built an enormous collection of these, all carefully curated. It is possible that the drug Prednisone played a role in his aberrant trajectory. Dennis Rader appeared similarly to be a respectable family man. There were several early experiences that he recalled (e.g. seeing his mother trapped) which might have played a role in his development.

Ted Bundy was separated from any individual caregiver after birth. Apparently, he was disturbed by the uncertainty around who was his biological mother. Pretense on who she really was might also have contributed to his distress. These experiences seemed to have initiated his resentment against women, which were subsequently inflamed by jilting. Intelligent, handsome and articulate, Bundy was described as a most unlikely serial killer, which shows the limitations of stereotypes. He was very sensitive to social class and uncomfortable with his own position. He illustrates a feature of displaced aggression: that retribution can be out of all proportion to the initial trigger. Bundy was an organized offender committing murder in a series of states of the Union. However, he became somewhat disorganized at the end of his killing series. Bundy exemplifies the use of cognitive empathy to gain access to his victims. He claimed that violent pornography played a role.

A paraphilia is sexual behaviour that lies outside conventional bounds, such as exhibitionism. They are of interest in that lust killers commonly also exhibit paraphilias, and they can form an association with killing. Voyeurism sometimes features in association with lust killing, as a gateway activity. A fetish describes sexual arousal to an inanimate object, while a partialism describes sexual arousal to particular body features, such as feet. Serial lust killers often take objects (such as items of clothing) from their victims, in an attempt to recreate the killing, accompanied by masturbation. Sometimes a body part is taken, such as a breast. The term ‘picquerism’ refers to sexual arousal derived from cutting the skin. There are some features in common between non-lethal rape and lust killing. Rape sometimes serves as a gateway activity for lust killing. Some men are attracted to necrophilia without showing violence towards their target.

We know a lot about Jack the Ripper’s crimes, but have no idea as to who he was. His crimes had a sexual character, and his dislike of women could be because he caught venereal disease from one. He targeted, amongst other regions, the women’s sex organs. We don’t know the identity of the Zodiac Killer, who targeted courting couples. It is likely that he felt envy towards them. Although Albert DeSalvo was widely believed to be the ‘Boston Strangler’, not everyone is in agreement about this and he was not found guilty of these crimes. However, his toxic upbringing and his characteristics of offending fit the pattern of other known serial killers. He showed evidence of dissociation. DNA evidence points to his involvement in at least one of the murders. A perspective of motivation might cast some light on these cases.

Building on Gustavo Pellón’s classification of Spanish-American novels as documentary novels (novela testimonio), historical novels, detective novels, and marginalized novels, this chapter places them into two groups of psychoanalytic categories: voyeurism/exhibitionism and sadism/masochism, that influence the identity of the subject. The schematic voyeurism-exhibitionism/sadism-masochism in the novels explored in this chapter places focus on concepts that imply an Ego placing its gaze on the world; it acknowledges that we are in constant repetition, learning how to deal with the levels of violence and pain, which, in essence, is translated into how to deal with the Eros and Death drives. Examining Rosario Tijeras by Jorge Franco as a case study, the chapter explores the applicability of psychoanalysis as it applies to these texts and considers some of the other categories of novels that emerge from this larger, complex cultural context of Latin American literature.

Chapter 2 describes the theoretical approach to the concept of obscenity by examining what counts as “horrifically graphic,” a term drawn from the coverage of American soldiers burning dead bodies in Fallujah, Iraq, and the release of these images by the entertainment website TMZ. Drawing on a variety of theorists, it uses the framing of the taboo to articulate the idea of an obscenity norm that functions towards a particular politics. It situates the contributions of this work more substantively in terms of how it speaks to constructivist work on norms, the growing literature on emotions in global politics, and the visual politics literature. Specifically, this chapters theorizes three main ideas related to the obscenity norm and its functioning: (1) the existence of the taboo itself as something that plays with our perception of whether images depict the real, (2) the functioning of regulations on images such as trigger warnings or image bans, and (3) the relationship between the obscenity norm and the larger dynamics of security and securitization.

Chapter 6 shifts the focus to female performers within the classical music industry. Francesca Placanica considers the increased opportunities which female performers, both singers and instrumentalists, gained throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, not only in terms of being able to achieve star status, but also through being able to integrate into professional orchestras. Focusing upon the trumpeter Alison Balsom and percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, she considers the new opportunities that have developed over recent decades for women to maintain careers as virtuosa performers of instruments historically deemed unsuitable for women to play. Placanica also deftly probes the high degree of sexualisation which many contemporary performers, including Yuja Wang, Katherine Jenkins, and Vanessa Mae, face in the contemporary classical music industry and how this can be negotiated in a mediatised culture.