True Crime Through A Feminist Identity Lens

Women are offenders, victims, and bystanders in identity crime, offences depicted in a rich true crime literature. The chapter initially discusses the protean nature of identity crime, including its conceptualisation, motivations, harms, and justifications. The chapter then outlines the lineage of feminist identity crime as a subgenre or topic of true crime literature. It next discusses the activity of specific female identity criminals over several centuries as a matter of self-fashioning and the narration, unreliable or otherwise, of their agency. In conclusion, the chapter suggests that considering accounts of figures such as “Princess Caraboo,” Hannah Snell, Thérèse Humbert, Misha Defonseca, and Anna Delvey offers insights about both true crime writing (a genre that valorises the spectacular) and about law’s understanding of female identity.