5 Conclusion

Life of the Party not only allows us to analyze how crime media shapes an individual’s experience of fear of sexualized violence, it also allows us a window into the broader mechanisms of white supremacy and patriarchy. Gatwood excavates her own fear and the ways it is simultaneously a product of her very real experiences of violence and the cultural transmission of symbols which has taught her her position as the most likely potential victim. She transmits the visceral experience of this fear to her reader so they are forced to grapple with the realities of rape culture while problematizing her personal narrative with the ways in which it is “a privilege to have your body looked for” and mourned (Gatwood 2019:xiii). In doing so, Gatwood not only situates her own whiteness within her fear, she also launches a critique of how true crime engineers a particular form of victimhood for beautiful white women. She not only sociologically examines her own true crime obsession, but also the mechanisms of structures of the genre at large.

In her introduction, Gatwood stresses how much of this media she has consumed, but she also notes that the true crime she wants is not the true crime that exists. She writes:

The true crime I want is written by women. The true crime I want moves beyond the star athlete. I want stories that honor girls, not sensationalize them. … The true crime I want knows that more than half of the women murdered worldwide are killed by their partners or family members. The true crime I want does not celebrate police or prison as a final act of justice, but recognizes these systems as perpetrators too– defective corrupt, and complicit in the same violence that they prosecute. 

The true crime media Gatwood craves is that which does not exist, media which accurately reflects women’s lives and honors them for their resilience in the face of such trauma. While this book is not a crime TV show or podcast, in many ways Gatwood’s project is to make the depiction of sexualized violence she wishes to consume– it engages with the heavy realities of rape and murder while honoring women’s survivorship instead of sensationalizing it. She also does this by engaging with the intersection of race and gender, critiquing the ways in which the fixation on white women’s victimhood comes at the cost of invisibilizing women of color. In doing so, Gatwood defines the stake that poetry has in this conversation– to not only “help us feel less alone in the dark” (Gatwood 2019:xv), but also to force us to recenter our fight against sexualized violence on the women of color & trans people whom it most harms.