What does a comparison of these cases suggest, then, about the gendering of sentimentality, and the effects of a sentimental aesthetic in drawing attention to political issues such as the death penalty? Kahane is critical of a sentimental politics on the ground that although pathos is ‘often manipulated to arouse public sentiment about issues of social and political significance, its conventional link to feminine sensibility has also made it suspect in rendering the gravity of public issues’.^[85] The case of Van Nguyen, which was sentimentalised through a focus on his mother and his childhood, and the pathos aroused by the loss of his young life in circumstances that to many seemed simply excessive, suggests that today a sentimental politics is not linked exclusively to feminine sensibility, but is available to individual male victims as well as female victims. At the same time, it is crucial to acknowledge that gendered meanings about femininity and masculinity played a role in the sentimentalising of Van Nguyen and Bywaters. In both cases, a key to sentimentalising the men, and attracting support for their cases, was the use of images of their mothers and their own youth, which enabled them to be figured as ‘boys’, with all the connotations that suggests. Likewise, gendered stereotypes rendered Thompson unsympathetic: a campaign of sentimentality backfired in her case because, through gendered stereotypes, she was represented as a calculating and conniving woman who brought Bywaters to ruin. In the Thompson and Bywaters case, the media coverage, by supporting the claim that Thompson through her letters ‘incited’ Bywaters to murder, continually displaced responsibility from him to her, and thereby ‘naturalised’ his violent crime. This helps to explain why there was no petition for a reprieve for her — because she was represented as bringing about Bywaters’ ruin, she could not be sentimentalised, whereas he, eight years younger than her, could be rendered the victim of her manipulation. The cases of the men, when read against the contrast of Edith Thompson’s case, reveal the exclusiveness of a sentimental politics: the individual must be able to be rendered sympathetic to the public for a sentimental aesthetic to be effective, and this involves the meanings of gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity and the like in a particular culture. In other words, in any case, there are a mix of individual variables, social and political context, and media strategies, that will render a sentimental campaign effective or not. The contingency of a sentimental politics is, I think, one reason it does not provide a solid basis for a campaign against the death penalty. Of course, it is still too early to tell if the media publicity of Van Nguyen’s case will have a lasting impact in Singapore, but it is important to note that the media attention to his case at least put the issue on the agenda for ordinary Singaporeans. One final point: the meanings of femininity were crucial in rendering Edith Thompson’s execution a symbol of the horrors of capital punishment. Before she was hanged, there was already feeling against hanging a woman on the grounds of her femininity, which was considered liable to make women more susceptible to collapse and to expose witnesses to shame and humiliation. It was feared that women would not go to their execution in a manly fashion, and would thereby give the lie to the government’s claim that hanging was a quick and clean method of execution. Whether the rumours about her execution were true, they functioned to make visible the horrors of hanging, and its traumatising effect on direct and indirect witnesses. Her case had lasting significance, because it shifted the focus from the victim to the witnesses, who perhaps came to see themselves as unwilling ‘collaborators’ in judicial execution.