Abstract

Widely circulated cultural conceptions about women who have committed violence recurrently place them in positions of otherness in relation to what is considered as being normal, valuable womanhood. This article explores ways in which Finnish women imprisoned for violent crimes grapple with this troubled relation between womanhood and violence in their enactments of gendered identities. The analysis is based on a novel, discursive-affective approach to positioning that can accommodate complexity and context-specific variability in enactments of identities. Four different, recurring modes of positioning are discussed in the analysis: aligning with forcefulness, aligning with vulnerability, -aligning with demonization and aligning with motherhood. By shedding light not only on the complexity and fluidity of these gendered identity enactments but also on their affectively ambivalent dimensions, the analysis contributes to attempts at countering reductionist views about women who have committed violence and the gendered dichotomizations that they work to reproduce.