What's natural about killing? Gender, copycat violence and natural born killers

With a lawsuit implicating Natural Born Killers in real-world violence stil l pending, the representation of violence in Oliver Stone's 1994 film remai ns a controversial issue. This article examines the gendering of violence-b oth in the film itself and in three of the most infamous 'copycat' cases-an d demonstrates that the apparently gender-neutral term 'natural born killer s' is used to disguise the normalisation of male violence on- and off-scree n. While male violence is normalised, it is argued that representations of female violence emphasise transformation and undercut women's violent subje ctivity through a re-positioning of women as erotic objects.