Adrian Howe

Research Fellow, Socio-Legal Research Centre, Griffith University, Australia

Adrian Howe is a Research Fellow, Socio-Legal Research Centre, Griffith University, Australia. She researches in the field of sexed violence. Her publications include Sex, Violence and Crime—Foucault and the ‘Man’ Question (Routledge-Cavendish 2008); (co-editor with Maureen Cain) Women, Crime and Social Harm: Towards a Criminology for the Global Era (Hart Publishing 2008); ‘Fatal Love’, Griffith Journal of Law and Human Dignity 2(1) 2014: 4-24 and ‘Mastering Emotions or Still Losing Control?—Seeking Public Engagement with Sexual Infidelity Homicide’, Feminist Legal Studies 21(2) 2013: 141-161. Her most recent work on intimate partner homicide has a Shakespearean inflection: ‘“Red Mist” Homicide—Sexual Infidelity and the English Law of Murder (Glossing Titus Andronicus)’ Legal Studies 3, 2013: 407-430; ‘Enduring Fictions of Possession—Sexual Infidelity and Homicidal Rage in Shakespeare and Late Modernity (glossing Othello)’, Griffith Law Review 21, 2012: 772-796; ‘A Right to Passions?  Compassion’s Sexed Asymmetry and a Minor Comedy of Errors’ 23(2) Law and Critique 2012: 83-102.

She is currently developing a public engagement theatre project involving a series of dramas aimed at elevating the killing of women by male partners and former partners, on average two a week in England and Wales over the last 30 years, into a first-order social problem. The project is outlined in ‘Dramatising Intimate Femicide─Petitions, Plays, Public Engagement (with a Shakespearean Gloss)’ Canadian Journal of Women and the Law (in press). The project transposes Shakespeare’s uncannily timely parodies of men’s possessive jealousy and homicidal rage into 21st-century dramatisations of intimate femicide cases. Weaving excerpts from Othello with excerpts from historic and contemporary criminal trials, the first drama, White Othellos on Trial, subverts the usual presumption that cultural defences are deployed exclusively by minority ethnic defendants. The drama showcases provocation by infidelity as a deeply ingrained cultural excuse for English wife-killers, in short, as their version of honour killing.