Celebrating Kate: The Criminal-Celebrity of Sydney Underworld Figure,Kate Leigh

Combining historical study with cultural criminology, this paper analyses the criminal-celebrity of Sydney underworld figure Kate Leigh. It seeks to demonstrate how the three main factors of public resonance—crime type, context and image—created the celebrated criminality of Leigh. Without public resonance, Leigh would have simply remained another criminal within society. An important element of Leigh's celebrated criminality was her ability to manage a public image that was accepted within the impoverished, working-class communities of eastern Sydney. Leigh became a criminal icon through an entrepreneurial style based on the anti-authoritarian and egalitarian values of working-class life in eastern Sydney. Criminal-celebrity theory provides a framework for understanding the factors enabling the celebration of criminals in society. It also informs historians about the ways in which criminals can manipulate their public image in an effort to legitimise their activities and gain acceptance in the community.     

A perfect storm of neglect and failure: postwar capitalist restoration in Northern Morazán,El Salvador

This essay addresses economic relationships in northern Morazán, El Salvador, as they transitioned from a wartime subsistence regime to postwar integration into national and international capitalist circuits of production and exchange. It critically analyses the economic discourses and actions employed by the state, NGOs, and others to discipline the vagrant subjectivities of former FMLN insurgents, their social base, and ex-refugees. Much of the argument is developed via discussions of the postwar fates of residents of Ciudad Segundo Montes and peasant collaborators of the Community Development Council of Northern Morazán and San Miguel. Critical analysis of these cases suggest that economic relationships constitute not merely a product – however contradictory – of struggle over hegemony, but are important channels through which hegemony itself is secured.