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Barbara
Cruikshank
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1114
Cruikshank
tions as well as to affect the outcomes of their own cases. When prisons
single out jailhouse lawyers, they too are acting strategically in a contest
over the lives and bodies of prisoners. If feminists treat each case as a strategic contest, there is always room for gender to matter differently.
For these reasons, understanding capital punishment as a strategic contest is not cynical. To the contrary, it is optimistic to think that feminists
might intervene at any point in a capital punishment case. By considering
gender here only as it plays a part in that strategic contest, I do not mean
to imply that gender has no deeper meaning or significance. Rather, my
point is that, at least as far as feminism is concerned, it is important to
concentrate on how gender figures as a part of the strategic contest in
which the condemned find themselves. Most important, it is possible that
gender could figure at every strategic point, and so it is crucial that the
meaning or significance of gender not be fixed in advance.
The strategy that Tuckerpursued was to deny the significance of gender
in her own case and in relation to her crime: "When we are talking about
the crime I committed, gender has no place as an issue" (Verhovek 1998,
3). Yet, given all the publicity that surrounded her execution because she
was a woman, how could she say that gender had no place?Moreover, why
did she say it? I believe her claims were made to escape death, not to express an article of faith or a principle. Her only chance for salvation in this
world was to make an argument that would convince Governor Bush to
grant her clemency. Bush claimed that her gender would not figure in his
decision because he was determined to apply the law in a liberal way, to
the individual qua individual. Gender, or the denial of gender, was a point
of resistancefor Tuckerin the sense that her refusalto see her case as exceptional undercut any justification of her execution that Bush could make
based on treating women the same as men. By making her own case against
the significance of gender, Tucker was trying to steal Bush's bluster.
She knew that if she tried to make the case that women should not be
killed, Governor Bush would let her die to demonstrate his own genderblindness. The two parties denied the significance of gender for opposite
reasons. They did so not because either held strongly feminist or antifeminist views but because they were caught up together in a contest that neither could win so long as gender was seen to play a part.
Tucker and other notable fundamentalists made the case that she was
saved in the eyes of God. As a born-again believer, she would supposedly
no longer be capable of murder and mayhem. This defense, however, depended on overcoming the dominant media interpretation of her case as
gendered. Unable to do so, it could be said, Tuckerwas executed. Despite
Tucker'ssalvation in the eyes of God and her redemption within a commu-
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S IG N S
Summer 1999
1115
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1116
Cruikshank
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S IG N S
Summer 1999
1117
References
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Foucault, Michel. 1977. Disciplineand Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York:
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Pens,Dan. 1998. "Hungryfor Justicein L.A."In TheCellingofAmerica:An
Lookat the US. PrisonIndustry,ed. Daniel Burton-Rose, 231. Monroe, Maine:
CommonCouragePress.
NewYorkTimes,February
Verhovek,Sam Howe. 1998. "DeadWomenWaiting."
sec.
1.
8,
4, p.
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