Killing a “Monster”: Lisa Montgomery, Carceral Logics, and the Rhetoric of Sexual Trauma

Abstract

What happens when we treat sexual trauma as a disability? This article examines the federal execution case of Lisa Montgomery, who murdered Bobbie Jo Stinnett and kidnapped her baby, with this question as its motivation. Prior to execution, dozens of clemency petitions circulated publicly, revealing how Montgomery was repeatedly subjected to instances of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse across her lifetime, generating robust commentary about mental disability and sexual violence. I argue that these petitions—even in their effort to retrain public opinion of how Montgomery’s history shaped her actions—upheld carceral logics that insisted Montgomery must pay for her bodymind, reinforcing the idea that mentally ill women do not belong in the public sphere. By carving critical space for sexual violence within feminist disability studies, this article demonstrates how the tensions that ensue when categorizing the aftermath of sexual trauma as a disability result from a discursive incapacity of the state.

Keywords:

• Bodymind
• feminist disability studies
• mental disability
• public deliberation
• sexual violence

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Marissa Doshi and the two anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and Emily Winderman for reading various drafts of this article and lending time and support throughout the many stages of drafting. I would also like to thank Martina Manicastri for her invaluable research assistance.

Notes

1 The details of the murder are admittedly gruesome: Montgomery strangled Stinnett and cut the unborn fetus from her womb.

2 Following Margaret Price, I use mental disability as an umbrella term that accounts for cognitive, intellectual, and psychiatric disabilities; brain injury; trauma; a/Autism, m/Madness, and mental illness (see Price, Mad at School).

3 I use the feminist materialist disability concept, the bodymind, coined by Price to identify the inextricable connection between the body and mind (see Price, “The Bodymind Problem”).

4 My call to incorporate sexual violence more critically into feminist disability studies does not mean to suggest that all people who experience rape and/or sexual assault are disabled or that the aftermath of such experiences is always disabling. I recognize that people process and experience sexual violence differently, especially due to their own identities and backgrounds. With that said, one goal of this article is to normalize how victims can and do experience a range of mental disabilities after sexual violence and make critical space within both theoretical and public discourse to acknowledge the shifting nature of mental health so many face in the aftermath of rape and/or sexual assault.

5 Here, I draw from Jay Dolmage’s definition of rhetoric as the “strategic study of the circulation of power through communication” (Disability Rhetoric 3).

6 For more on critiques of the place of whiteness within feminist disability studies, see Puar; and Schalk and Kim.

7 For more on rhetorical approaches to using disabling or a feeling of disablement as an analytic, see Cedillo; Chávez; Dolmage, Disabled Upon Arrival; Hsu, “Irreducible Damage”; and Johnson.

8 The four domains Schalk and Kim explore are discourse, state violence, health/care, and activism.

9 For more on the history of how women who kill are treated in and by the legal system, see Atwell; Farr; Rapaport, “Some Questions,” “The Death Penalty”; Shatz and Shatz; and Shipman.