Citation

D'Cruze S. Womens Hist. Rev. 2007; 16(5): 701-722.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/09612020701447749

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In 1935, Dr Buck Ruxton, a Parsee living and practising medicine in a provincial, northern English town, murdered and dismembered his wife and the household’s nursery maid. Sensational murder trials received extensive press coverage and since, at this period, such cases were very often domestic or courtship homicides, they fed a widespread middle-class and popular fascination with stories of respectable family or romance relationships gone drastically awry. Through this case study, this article explores the contested public representations of gendered bodies, located at the intersections of judicial, forensic and popular frameworks of signification. If Bourdieu’s concept of habitus can offer a way of understanding the relationships between body, gender and identity, the Buck Ruxton case demonstrates the limits of raced, gendered and classed self-fashioning across different fields; the professional, the intimate, and the domestic. The intimate violence explicated through the judicial process was disturbing to both popular and middle-class audiences with their differentiated social and cultural investments in both domestic respectability and the professional reliability of the general practitioner in 1930s Britain.