Ed gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer

Interesting and enlightening in both the reportage of Gein's crimes and the fictionalized accounts about him are the particular elements which these accounts highlight or repeat. Specifically, the accounts cannot offer much information to support the conclusion that Gein was a transgendered individual or gay; indeed, he was quite clearly interested in women even if none returned this interest.

Nor are most transgendered persons psychopathic or murderers. Yet the cultural association persists[56] — to the detriment of differently-gendered people everywhere. The sites frequently illustrate this last concern with a picture of Bernice Worden's decapitated body hanging from the rafters. Her corpse somehow serves as "proof" of Gein's gender deviance.

Specifically, Gein is now characterized as a "transvestite,"[57] as someone with "a gender identity disorder"[58] and in cinematic representations as effete if not gay. Life magazine, which ran an 8-page pictorial sporting the headline "House of Horror Stuns the Nation" two weeks after Gein's arrest, announced that Gein "wished he were a woman. The local crime lab director, Charles Wilson, said of this proclamation, "It's news to me.

The November 21st issue of the Journal ran a story claiming that Gein's "unnatural attachment" to his mother caused an "Oedipus Complex" that resulted in Ed wishing. He considered inquiring about an operation to change into a woman and even thought of trying the operation upon himself, but did nothing about such plans.

The obvious inconsistencies in this Freudian account are glossed over by the Journal and by Dr. Edward Kelleher,[64] a Chicago psychiatrist who offered a long-distance, arm-chair analysis of Ed Gein for both the Journal and several Chicago newspapers. Kelleher diagnosed Gein as a "schizophrenic," psychopath who presented symptoms of "acute transvestism, fetishism and necrophilia. Warmington; and Dr. Edward Schubert, the head psychiatrist at the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, suggested that Gein was most probably psychotic but not a necrophile.

And although the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory indicated that Gein had a "feminine identification,"[67] none of the reports profiled him as a transvestite.

In fact, Warmington maintained that Gein's desire for female body parts was a manifestation of his attempts not to be his mother but to find a "substitute for [her in the form of a replica or body that could be kept indefinitely. Most likely, the stories about Gein's cross-dressing can be traced to one of his "confessions. Despite Schechter's observation that "Wilimovsky had to be careful not to put words into Gein's mouth,"[71] this seems precisely what happened. The question and answer sequence bespeaks, perhaps, as much about Wilimovsky as it communicates about what Gein actually did.

Her disturbed exclamation to Crawford reinforces the idea that what is horrible about Bill is not that he kills women but that he wants to dress up as a woman. Lecter's cannibalism, typically a horrible prospect, in effect becomes effaced by this narrative structure.

In the documentary, Moore claims to quote Dr. Kelleher of Chicago, saying that Gein was a "frustrated transsexual" and police investigators found books about Christine Jorgensen's sex-change operation on Gein's shelves. Moore frames his revelations about Gein with dramatic pauses, implying that Gein's reputed interest in transsexualism and desire to be a woman are horrific. Immediately after revealing this information, Moore pauses and intones, "He was one sick guy.

Gein's pathology is affirmed through his curiosity about Jorgensen, and this curiosity serves as an explanation for his deviance. Moore's claims about Gein are highly unlikely given that Jorgensen's autobiography did not come out until and Gein could hardly have had it. Further, psychiatrist Harry Benjamin's discussion of Jorgensen took the form of a series of papers in psychiatric journals, materials which Gein was unlikely to have recourse to or keep on his shelves.

Gein began his grave robbing in the first body he exhumed was buried in — the condition of the bodily artifacts found in Gem's home indicate that most were exhumed shortly after their funerals; he followed the obituaries in order to locate suitable bodies ; Jorgensen's story was not in the news until four years after Gein's initial forays into the cemetery. Jorgensen and the possibility of a sex-change operation were clearly not the inspiration for these midnight outings.

Nonetheless, it is understandable that the popular media representations in of the Gein crime would portray him as transsexual and that the police would necessarily understand his crimes in this fashion. Transvestism and transsexuality provided hot topics for discussion in the legal and psychiatric circles in the late s. It is questionable whether Gem himself would have had access to much of this media; his farmhouse lacked both electricity and running water, and Gein did not possess much discretionary income which would allow for the purchase of magazines such as Life, Time or Newsweek.

Jorgensen's story, however, probably ran in local papers, too. It is not possible to know for certain whether or not Gem had curiosity about transsexuality, nor, perhaps, is it that essential to know. Most significant is how Gem is represented and how these representations paradoxically function to construct him as monstrous and to pathologize transgender identity. All of the accounts of Gein I have read focus on his relationship with his mother, highlighting more or less, the pathological nature of their connection.

Time magazine called Gein "a mama's boy" who hated "other women as mama had willed. Thus, in part, Gein's pathology resided in an indication that he was not fully masculine in an era obsessed with proper forms of masculinity. Robert Bloch capitalizes on descriptions of Gein's effeminacy and portrays Norman as an impotent "mama's boy," a "secret transvestite" who is not masculine enough to be accepted into the army.

Indeed, 's United States was rife with fear about homosexuality, mothers and male effeminacy. Physically, organically, there's no reason in the world why this should be…The psychiatrist agreed with Wyatt that the 'problem can be laid at the parent's doorstep. It is difficult to discern whether Augusta Gein was as overbearing as accounts indicate, or if the representations of her merely dovetail with 's attitudes about bad mothers?

At any rate, Augusta as a castrating, harpy mother figure both reflects and "explains" Ed's deviance. Ironically, Gein described his father not his mother as abusive, indicating that George Gein was an alcoholic who drank excessively and abused both Ed and his brother. In any case, the 's fear that homosexuality existed everywhere and posed a threat to everyone is apparent in the media's representation of Ed Gein as effeminate, a transvestite or transsexual[93] and the narrative trope that these conditions "explain" his psychosis and the subsequent fictionalizations of his crimes which stress one or the other of these diagnoses.

Likewise, improper mothering not only provided an explanation for the etiology of sexual deviance[94] but also for the origins of anti-social behavior or psychosis. Augusta Gein as overbearing mother and religious moralist is depicted as the ultimate cause of Ed's deviant sexual behavior and criminality. According to Estelle B. Freedman, the relatively new category of "sexual psychopath" created by psychiatrists, journalists and politicians crystallized by the end of the s. In part, interpreting Gein as a murderous transvestite or transsexual reflects the emergent category of "sexual psychopath.

Martha A. Schmidt catalogues a related phenomenon in her analysis of the media coverage of Jeffrey Dahmer's crimes and trial. Jentzen coined the phrase "homosexual overkill" to explain an earlier murder case in Racine County, Wisconsin.

Neither the victim nor the killer were actually gay — the ME was simply speculating about motive. This phrase entered Milwaukee's legal vernacular and was used to diagnose and explain Dahmer's violence. Subsequently, the media used and popularized the term, even though it is not part of psychiatric terminology. In particular, "homosexual overkill" suggests that violence is the outcome of homosexual desire run rampant instead of partially the result of Dahmer's virulent homophobia.

This neat analogy, however, does not tell the entire story, and constructing serial killers as transgender is a form of projection and denial.

According to Richard Tithecott, author of Men and Monsters: Jefrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer , "We fail to read the serial killer" accurately because he is an embodiment of "society's dominant values. However, as a culture we are so unable to admit or recognize the connection between our dominant forms of masculinity and "violent misogynistic crimes" that we must attribute some other kind of motive to them besides masculinity.

Thus, murderous rage is queered, and queerness becomes the privileged signifier for psychotic violence. Gein as an historic figure does not offer one stable interpretation but remains multiply interpretable as cannibal, transvestite, fetishist, necrophile, mama's boy, transsexual, and like Lecter, as cult hero.

I am using the word "transgender" as an umbrella term to encompass transsexual, transvestite and intersex bodies, in part, because cinematic representations do not delineate between these categories, and in part, because the term problematizes the two-gender system.

My use of the term is inflected by Susan Stryker's admonition that "trans gender" can represent "all types of normative expressions of gender or sexed embodiment" Dustin Hoffman plays an out-of-work actor, Michael Dorsey, who dresses as a woman in order to gain employment.

Tom Ranks plays one of two men who dress as women in order to live in a women's hotel and pay inexpensive rent. Robin Williams cross-dresses so that he can act as a nanny to his children, to whom he has been denied access in a custody fight. Showalter argues that putting on femininity is an avenue to power for men.

This phrase is Carol Clover's. She indicates that the motivation supplied for violent killing in mainstream cinema is the "psychosexual fury" of a man in distress about his failed masculinity Kate Bornstein argues that "fear and loathing" are common reactions to the transgender body, as is violence Martin's, One reviewer notes that Lecter is constructed as "saint, guru, seer, and soothsayer rolled into one. Eventually, that scene becomes the cause of neurosis. Freud asserts that hysterics basically suffer from reminiscences, memory.

It is the memory that makes the event hysterical. Let us say that the child is exposed to something, the initial event is something the child represses without reacting to it and even experiencing anxiety, fear.

Hence, one can conclude that the event which causes the trauma, happened, but at the same time not happened. He mainly sees trauma as a supporting factor to neurosis.

Additionally and more importantly, Freud later considers trauma with its relation to the disposition of the subject. He observes the compulsion to repeat in the victims of trauma in two forms. Soldiers constantly dream about the war front, wounding, and killing. For example, a child abused by his father, dreams a man like him and the abuse continues. Because of its intensity, you cannot respond to it. It is an experience which no one can claim as his or her own. So, on the one hand, you are filled with horror and you do repress some aspects of it, but you also want to return so that you can respond, do better, dominate, master the experience.

By repeating it, you aim to dominate it, to understand it, to see it. The event has dominated you before; yours is an attempt to master an event that has dominated you. Eventually, it shakes the wholeness of the subject. Freud is bothered by the idea that this kind of trauma is perceived as different from libidinal trauma. Freud confesses that it is difficult, nearly impossible to connect war traumas to early childhood experiences. In Lacanian terms, trauma can be defined as the loss of unity with the mother, intrusion of language in the symbolic order, loss of phallus; fear of castration is the original trauma for Lacan.

It is something that shapes, marks the subject forever. The whole processes of desire, substitution, objet petit a, fantasies, could be seen as repetition compulsion for Lacan. All these experiences are not mastered by the subject, but they produce the subject.

Again, there is the tension: on the one hand, trauma is the universal element of psychoanalytical theory of the subject.

On the other hand, specific kinds of trauma that threatens normal functioning of the psyche, and which result in more drastic symptoms, difficulties becomes more interesting focuses of attention; especially in the collective forms of trauma. How might he have applied his theories in order to solve crime? Okay, at least not more than any other. Being with Bombs crime, media and cultural forensics. Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer by K.

Sullivan from Jump Cut , no. NOTES 1. Chronicle of the Cinema , Ed. Robert Karney London: Dorling Kindersley. Brian D. Truffaut Life , In developing his proposition, Bond—a London-based writer and photographer whose author photo suggests a guy suffering from chronic insomnia—became a regular visitor to the National Archive in order to study extant materials pertaining to murders that took place in England between and He was surely regarded by the more judgmental clerks with some suspicion.

When he made inquiries he was escorted by a senior archivist through hidden doors and down a long corridor into a conference room where three men waited for him, the closed case file box resting on a table between them. Which goes some distance toward explaining why, despite the wealth of superb writing out there covering photography in myriad forms, the critical writing on crime scene photography remains undernourished.

Bond suggests an apparent order in the chaotic disarray left in the wake of a psychotic murder, for example. Whether or not this methodology signals any sort of innovation in the established standards of police investigations I have no idea. The perverse killer is found in a case where a woman is killed in her back garden, in full, almost theatrically staged view of a window, or potential witness.

The psychotic killer is found in a confession that explains how murder was necessitated by mortal danger emanating from a bar of soap. Imaginatively citing the writings of J. Ballard, William Burroughs, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Slavoj Zizek—who also happens to be the curator of the series to which Lacan at the Scene belongs—and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, Michelangelo Antonioni, David Lynch and Christopher Nolan, among many others, Bond offers numerous points of reference through which to contextualize his investigatory process.

Straddling fact and fiction, the established and the untested theoretical, using language that is always to the point without being excessively cold or alienating, he takes the reader through a labyrinth of nightmare to gain wider insight into how our minds betray us, and how we can understand the residue of trauma.

It might even help you understand non-homicidal behaviour a little better. Archives March 4 November 9 October 17 August Create a free website or blog at WordPress. Mid Mo Design. Follow Following. Being with Bombs. The coroner ruled that Henry died of asphyxiation. Some say Henry was Ed's first victim, a type of Cain and Abel murder, but he was never even a suspect in his brother's death.

After Henry's funeral, Augusta had a paralysing stroke, leaving Ed to care for her completely. She died in December of , leaving Ed devastated and totally alone.

Two years after his mother's death, Ed began visiting graveyards in the dead of night. He dug up the graves of nine women he hoped looked like his mother, took them home and treated their skin to create a leather effect. Once their skin was tanned, he started to create a woman suit using the remains of his victims, because he wanted to 'become his mother, crawl into her skin'.

Later, when he was finally arrested, Gein stated that he shot and killed a woman called Mary Hogan in She was a tavern owner, whose head was found in a wooden box on Ed's property. It is not exactly clear what he did to her body. At this point, Gein has admitted to one murder. Disregarding the terrible mutilations he committed on Mary's body, he still doesn't fit into the serial killer category.

In , hardware store owner Bernice Worden went missing. Ed was served by her at the store the morning she disappeared. Police searched his property and discovered Worden's decapitated body hanging in Gein's shed. According to reports, her body had been mutilated, and Gein had cut her from the top of her chest to her genitals, giving the impression she was 'dressed out like a deer'. Her cause of death was a single gunshot wound. Upon further inspection of the property, police found numerous items made of human flesh and bones, including a wastepaper basket made of human skin, bowls made from human skulls, a corset made of the skin of a female torso and Mary Hogan's face in a brown paper bag.