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  • Feeling Like Killing?Queer Temporalities of Murderous Motives among Queer Children
  • Kathryn Bond Stockton (bio)

Charged with the drainage of dreams, the police catch them in their filters.

—Jean Genet, Querelle de Brest

(E)motions, or Feeling beside Oneself

Both of the girls hit their victim with a brick until her skull was badly broken. Using a purse to hide the brick, the girls had swung it by means of a stocking. The other killers, a pair of men with a different set of victims, had cut one throat with a hunting knife, then shot the other victims, one through a pillow, at point-blank range.

Swinging a brick; holding a knife against human skin; pulling a trigger against a head knowing you can't reverse that pull. Who, if anyone, feels like killing? What, if anything, is this feeling? And what kind of feeling is a motive for murder? A set of densities thickening motive—also thickening the queerness of children—surrounds these two different scenes of slaughter, both from the fifties, and their portrayals in two famous texts: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1965) and Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994). Motive is the mystery behind these murders, the clotted matter clinging to them—intriguingly so since the motive, in each case, was shared by two killers working in tandem. How, it was asked, could two individuals, in the same moment, reach the same rage?

With Capote's In Cold Blood, the people of Kansas had good reason to feel almost cheated on the question of motive, to turn their suspicions back on themselves, locking their doors against each other. Capote, quoting a detective about [End Page 301] the murder of the Clutters in 1959 (four family members, one whose throat was gruesomely slit), notes that it "was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning."1 The detective is referring to the fact that the Clutters were killed by two men who had never met them, who drove hundreds of miles to kill them with no apparent payoff in the form of robbery, though, as it later came to be known, the men mistakenly believed they would find a buried safe on the family farm. This circumstance "failed," says Capote, "to satisfy [the FBI's] sense of . . . design," which, according to the details of the murders, seemed to hinge on rage or revenge (245). That is to say, the bureau's agents could not discover a form for the feelings that they at last uncovered.

Jackson's Heavenly Creatures mines a murder five years prior to the murder of the Clutters. This was the killing, in New Zealand, of a mother, committed by her daughter and the daughter's "special" friend, who desperately sought to live together. Cannily, Jackson's film makes the meaning of motive rotate among the definitions the dictionary offers: "an emotion," "a desire," "a physical need."2 On the latter count, there is even motion, as the film displays the two girls' almost inexplicable, inexhaustible movements on the screen. Motive comes from the Latin word meaning "to move." If a motive is a motion propelling an action, what kind of motion, exactly, is it? How far back in the chain of explanation must we go to capture motive? How many other motives (or simple drives toward motions) lie beneath motives? Motive is the mystery inside the explanation, especially since the lawyers defending the girls made a plea for "joint insanity"—the girls moved to madness at the same time.

Another factor makes motive dense and the question of pairs of killers fraught. Each of these artists, Capote and Jackson, gives us a portrait of a queer child—a seemingly protohomosexual child (Perry in one text, Pauline in the other), paired with a seemingly normative partner (Dick, Juliet). And both artists, Capote and Jackson, through the queer child, end up displaying unforeseen motives that don't sound like feeling-like-killing at all: for Jackson, the two girls' wish to run through a manicured garden, or down a long dock, or up a staircase to flop on a bed in a beautiful room; for...

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