Hannah Deitch talks about why writing about criminal sapphic women can be revolutionary
BY HANNAH DEITCH, IMAGE PROVIDED
A stupid tattoo is a rite of passage. I’m unreasonably proud of mine: a snake sliced in half by the text “Congratulations, villains.” I got it with one of my best friends, with whom I share an unironically feral obsession with Survivor. Rewatching Season 20, Heroes vs. Villains, we found it hilarious that host Jeff Probst was forced to say “congratulations, villains” every time the baddies bested the heroes in a challenge. Naturally, we got these words inked onto our ankle flesh for eternity. Partly it’s because I can’t resist a bit, but mostly it’s because I just love a good villain.
Specifically, I love an outlaw. Outlaw is one of those perfectly literal words: its name declares its agenda. In an outlaw story, our “once upon a time” does not begin with the cop in pursuit of the bad guy, or the status quo-adhering superhero who puts the bandit in their place. It is the criminals themselves who captain the story, commandeering our attention away from the good and towards the bad and the ugly. In doing so, they flip those very paradigms on their heads. If the law punishes only the most unfortunate and spares its most privileged, if the institutions that structure our lives all bend in favour of the rich, then breaking from those institutions takes on a new meaning. Robbery is the outlaw’s favourite crime; violence is incidental. Thelma and Louise are being hunted down after they kill Thelma’s rapist, so they rob convenience stores to survive. Bonnie and Clyde robbed banks in an era when bankers were evicting the poor from their homes. Drawing attention to the material origins of the outlaw’s criminality makes it impossible to assign a simple black-and-white designation of good or evil. Their crimes take on a kind of troubled folk-heroism, asking why should we follow the law if the law is unjust to begin with?
The outlaw film is one of the rare cultural offerings where women are allowed to behave criminally and not be reviled for it. Traditionally, she has a male partner (the real-life Bonnie and Clyde, the fictional straight couples of Terence Malick’s Badlands, Tarantino’s True Romance, Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers; the list goes on). Perhaps it’s that her male partner creates a kind of onscreen sanction, giving the audience permission to accept her criminality in light of his. Or perhaps it’s that the lovers-on-the-run trope is one of the rare genres that draws a circle around why a criminal might commit violent acts, rather than merely sensationalizing how. The outlaw does not emerge from the earth without origins, brimming with bloodlust, eager to kill for sport. We see what made them what they are: the broken homes, the oppressive fathers, the cost of living, the injustice of the status quo.
Thelma and Louise takes this a step further by removing Clyde from the picture altogether, though this is pairing is about sisterhood and solidarity, not romance. But the outlaw pairing has major sapphic potential; it’s just a matter of pulling the thread. A few recent films and televisions shows have gone for it: Rose Glass’s 2024 lesbian horror film Love Lies Bleeding goes the furthest, though the outlaws-on-the-road aspect is admittedly minor. Killing Eve’s Villanelle is a hired assassin and fugitive in a cat-and-mouse dance with Eve, the foreign intelligence agent pursuing her. Eve is the only agent convinced that the assassin could be female; an insight that strikes her more traditional coworkers as too far-fetched. Set against the backdrop of oppressive Victorian England, the queer women of Sarah Waters’ historical fiction often court each other with the murder of their husbands or employers. In every example, women are not only operating outside the law, but outside of the domestic social contracts that keep queer women under heel.
My debut novel Killer Potential is my contribution to the still woefully small canon of criminal sapphic women. One ordinary Sunday, a broke, burnout SAT tutor shows up for work and discovers not only the dead bodies of her wealthy employers, but a terrible secret hidden within the walls of their lavish LA mansion: a bound woman held prisoner. After she and this mysterious hostage are discovered, they’re forced to go on the run. The queer women at the centre of this story are outlaws in every sense: they live on the road, steal cars, and invade vacation homes. The novel explores who is afforded power by default, and who must take it with violence. The outlaw pair in Killer Potential begin their journey with the bleak half-understanding that their positions in a pecking order have been decided for them, often by men in suits, observing the world from penthouses and stock exchanges. Putting a sapphic love story at the heart of this outlaw thriller was a way to romanticize the withdrawal from those asymmetric structures in the most literal sense – and in doing so, open the utopian potential of rejecting those institutions entirely.
Killer Potential – Hannah Deitch, Published by W&N, 20 March 2025. £24.99, Hardback.
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