Critical Condition

Description for CRITICAL CONDITION:  WOMEN ON THE EDGES OF VIOLENCE edited by Amy Scholder: While Aileen Wournos, the alleged “female serial killer” who insists she killed in self-defense, sits on death row, Hollywood filmmakers appropriate her story. Meanwhile, in our perverse justice system the sexual assaults and murders of forty-five women in San Diego are discounted by police and given file code name NHI, No Humans Involved, because the victims are perceived as marginal: sex workers, informants, homeless or working class women. The women in CRITICAL CONDITION challenge abuse and invisibility with powerful literary and visual art. They put a spin on issues of women and violence by focusing on women won fight back, sometimes killing their abusers; women who control their own sexualities and challenge conventional ideas of sex; women who assert images of themselves in a cultural landscape where none appear; women who reframe personal histories that were meant to shame them into obliv