Evidence of Cruel Optimism: Nick Broomfield's Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003)

Representations of women who kill often work hard to contain and explain their actions, attempting to manage the ways in which female killers disturb binary accounts of gender and sexual identity. Aileen Wuornos, as she appears in Broomfield’s two documentary films, is the abject other to postfeminist formulations of femininity. As a working class woman, a lesbian, a former sex worker and a prison inmate, Wuornos does not conform to the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century ‘common sense’ that Rosalind Gill argues has established postfeminism as ‘a kind of gendered neoliberalism’. Whereas postfeminist media representations focus on youthful white heterofemininity and a narrative of success founded on neoliberal fictions of equal opportunity, Wuornos’ case exposes the faultlines in such fantasies and draws attention to how they can damage or destroy the nonconforming subject.
This chapter returns to the depiction of Aileen Wuornos in Nick Broomfield’s 2003 documentary as a means of examining the ways in which women who kill expose what Lauren Berlant has termed ‘cruel optimism.’