The Killer Lesbian: a Trope we Love to Hate

 A common experience shared between many queer women is a cold, apprehensive stare from straight women, a physical awkwardness that builds and makes you feel like you’re not a fellow woman. But why is this feeling of being dangerous, or predatory so prevalent for queer women? This essay seeks to explore the ancient “killer lesbian” troupe; how it was developed and for what reasons, and where it appears in society today.  

In The Celluloid Closet, a collection of movies featuring lesbians were shown that depicted them as violent, predatory, or insane in some way. The movie explains that depictions of lesbianism often came with the implication that the woman was not only sick (as homosexuality was considered a mental illness at the time), but also “spoiled”, or having lost her femininity. In her article about the killer lesbian, Marakay Rogers explains the patriarchal reasons for this depiction. “The very challenge to order contained in representations of lesbians is restrained by depictions that[…]disenfranchise the out-of-the-law as the outlaw. This is why lesbians are often figured as murderers and vice-versa. The murderous lesbian characters in Paul Verhoeven's BASIC INSTINCT (1992), as well as the association of lesbians with vampires...highlight fears that lesbians threaten the death of patriarchy.” (Rogers) To men, women who love women are an upset of the natural order, a danger to the rule that a woman’s role is to love a man. In a kind of public service announcement to all women, the idea that queer women were to be viewed as dangerous was spread through their depiction as monstrous, insane, or most commonly vampiric. In Dracula’s Daughter, Countess Zaleska’s vampirism is mostly directed at women, and seen as a sickness she must overcome to be accepted by society, and men. This sickness, a thinly veiled metaphor for homosexuality, results in the death of a “pretty, young woman,” depicted as the perfect American beauty with all of the eurocentric beauty standards of the time. The message is clear: “Pure, virtuous young women beware of this deadly disease.” 

Dracula's Daughter, vampire attack scene

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1uvgx3NUR0

an link to Rebecca, (1940) one of the original examples of this troupe

Today, the killer lesbian can still easily be found in popular media. While there are more feminist undertones behind the murderous queer women of today’s shows, they feel old and overused. In her article about the killer lesbian, Bryony White explains this idea further through the lens of popular shows like Killing Eve. “[R]ecent appearances of the murderous queer feel like lazy iterations of a potentially liberatory politics. Destruction and disorder might signal the abolition of heteronormativity in favor of alternative kinships and non-normative desires. [...]But what we’re left with when the dust settles are glossy, recuperative projections of flattened, liberal #girlboss feminism.” (White) In Killing Eve, Villanelle is a beautiful, glamorous killer. She is someone who kills without abandon, sometimes for the fun of it. Killing is like an addiction for her, or something to be fixed. As Eve, the detective on Villanelle’s case, chases her around the world, she is shown to be drifting away from her heterosexual relationship, and into Eve’s world of depravity.  This depiction of queerness, while iconic, is still shown as something that taints relationships, a sickness that can draw others in. 

Killing Eve: Villanelle killing a man(left) and threatening Eve(right)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PMVFp529is

Jennifer's Body, Jennifer's death scene. A queer coded character is killed by her best friend/lover to stop her murderous rampage

                                                              Jennifer, from Jennifer's Body

It’s no wonder that lesbians and queer women in general are viewed as dangerous still by straight women. For years, cinema and T.V. have drilled the script of the killer lesbian into their audiences, and the implications that come along with it. Especially in countries with strong religious backgrounds that enforce purity culture and traditional femininity, lesbians are a threat that must be villainized and warned against. To uphold traditional gender roles means to uphold heterosexuality, and lesbians have to fit into that somehow. Queer women will have true representation only when we are not depicted as the monsters, the vampires of society, only when queerness is no longer considered a sickness. We need to continue fighting for shows and movies that show queer people as normal characters: not the gay best friend, not the killer lesbian, but just the person existing in the world with everyone else.