Welcome to MAI Issue 7: Female Detectives on TV

Dearest MAI Readers,

2021 continues to challenge us. Whilst the vaccine rollout has afforded some of us the ability to return to a semblance of our old lives, the dreadful impact of the Covid-19 pandemic continues worldwide. Daily we are reminded of the inequities (and indifference) of our political landscape, the sheer precarity of human life, and the scarcity of essential resources for so many people around the globe. This pandemic has provided a salient reminder that nothing can be taken for granted: neither human life nor animal life, and most certainly not the life of this planet that sustains us. 

Last year, in the autumn issue, we turned directly towards current events; we made space for the coping mechanisms so many have invoked to ‘tread water’ in the face of a future that remains in complete disarray. With this publication, we turn towards another outlet that has become a source of comfort and escapism during long periods of lockdown and isolation: television drama. And here, we once again celebrate the ongoing and unwavering sense of the global feminist community—a unique spirit of support for women everywhere. Our authors, peer reviewers and editors always hope to contribute to this, even in the most challenging of times. As this issue reveals, a similar set of feminist values often underpins contemporary TV narratives that feature female investigators. Perhaps this is why many of us have been almost religiously watching crime dramas with women detectives of diverse backgrounds since the start of the pandemic in 2020. Their actions on the small screen fascinate us, and often serve as a remedy for our forced inaction in real life, probably now more than ever before.

That said, this issue has been years in the making. We thank Laura Nicholson for her invaluable input on this project during its inception, and her passion for the topic. Crime drama that centres on the female detective offers one of the few spaces within global popular culture to address some of the cardinal conjectures and concerns of feminism: agency, autonomy, professional and personal identities, sexualised male violence, misogyny, race, gendered politics, and ageing (to take but a few of the themes discussed in this issue). Tanya Horeck and Jessica Ford have been instrumental in bringing this collection together, which is richly political and equally critical in examining these most popular diegetic characters. We thank them both hugely for their generosity, their insight, and their hard work and commitment to seeing this issue through to fruition. Alongside these essays, you will also find a range of miscellaneous pieces for which we are very proud to provide a platform. Finally, we thank, once again, Houman Sadri for his assiduous devotion to copyediting the majority of pieces in this issue. His labour is so precious and treasured by all of us here at MAI. It continues to afford us the ability to remain entirely independent of the vagaries (and considerable costs) of academic publishing at large.

We wish you a calm and peaceful summer and—most of all—happy reading.

Anna Backman Rogers & Anna Misiak
June 2021 (Gothenburg, Sweden and Falmouth, UK)

Lost Girl: Popular Feminism and Fables

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Critical Reflection

Examining fables and folklore in Showcase’s Lost Girl, Braithwaite unpacks how television helps us reimagine feminism.

1

Differentiating Holly Gibney: Genre, Gender and Intersectionality in The Outsider

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Critical Reflection

Erdogan illustrates how The Outsider with Holly Gibney offers new spaces containing contradictory elements, ideas and ideologies that might help us look at crime and horror TV in light of each other.

2

Consorting with Criminality: The Female Detective in Killing Eve

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Critical Reflection

Killing Eve offers a new spin on gender in crime TV by deploying dual female leads, as detective-protagonist and criminal-villain.

3

The Female Detective and Middlebrow Crime TV: Writers, Investigation and Authorship in Bones and Castle

by & Lindsay Steenberg

Critical Reflection

Tasker & Steenberg analyse Bones (Fox) and Castle (ABC) to consider the parameters of female representation in middlebrow crime TV.

4

‘Stella: Subject’—Feminist Grammar and Female Agency in The Fall

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Critical Reflection

Stella Gibson, the iconic lead from The Fall, uses her own ‘feminist grammar’ to gain agency in the hunt for a misogynist serial killer.

5

Solving the Crimes of Patriarchy: Meta-Lucidity and Middle-Aged Women in Happy Valley & Broadchurch

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Critical Reflection

Broadchurch and Happy Valley exemplify a trend in crime TV where women detectives become feminist agents solving the crimes of patriarchy.

6

‘How Could You Not Know?’: The Epistemological Precarity of The Female Detective as Mother

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Critical Reflection

Selznick claims that the assumption that women should always ‘know’ determines how female investigators on TV are expected to operate as both detectives and mothers.

7

‘What is Your Advice to the Drinking Housewife?’

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Critical Reflection

What links the deaths of Natalie Wood, Freud, Pamela Anderson, and some cultural critics to an episode of Diagnosis Murder? Is there something to be uncovered? Or, are you just being paranoid?

8

‘I’m Still Jenny from the Block’: Jennifer Lopez in Shades of Blue

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Critical Reflection

When Lopez appeared in Shades of Blue, her pop star image was simply incorporated into her detective character.

9

Reincarnations of Miss Marple on Russian TV: Challenging the Tropes of Female Ageing

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Critical Reflection

Looking at four Russian TV series with incarnations of Miss Marple, Souch considers popular media’s capacity for critical interrogation of contemporary discourses on female ageing. 

10

Popular Culture and the Forensic Female Gaze: Women Detectives in Unbelievable

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Critical Reflection

Unbelievable‘s detectives dismantle the overarching binaries of the professional/personal and the emotional/intellectual because they are not coded as objects of male fantasy.

11

Socialist Superwomanhood & Policing the Nation in the Hungarian TV Series Linda

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Critical Reflection

Linda ranks high for its endurance in Hungarian cultural memory, but perhaps the most resonant feature of the series is its upsetting gender politics.

12

The Intersections of Race and Gender: Representations of the First Female Afro-German Detective in Tatort

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Critical Reflection

Tatort has been on German TV since the 1970s. In 2019, it saw the first Afro-German woman as a lead detective. Fedtke sets this against the context of racial discourses in the country.

13

‘An Old Character Bag’: Joan Hickson as Miss Marple

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Critical Reflection

Mortimer discusses how with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple the BBC constructed a nostalgic view of a golden age of conservative Englishness.

14

Breaking down Sexist Barriers in Happy Valley

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Critical Reflection

Salter Dromm applies De Beauvoir’s theories of moral freedom to an analysis of Sergeant Catherine Cawood from Happy Valley.

15

Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdowns: Decentering the Female Detective in Collateral

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Critical Reflection

Hark examines how Collateral decentres narrative tropes of character and identity—a subversion that is largely due to the show’s writer.

16

Neither Voiceless Nor Unbelievable: Women Detectives & Rape Culture in Contemporary Italian TV

by & Valentina Re

Critical Reflection

With its enticing female detective and sensitive depiction of victims, Italian miniseries Voiceless forms a compelling example of feminist discourse in today’s TV.

17

Thick Description/Anatomy of a Scene: Top of the Lake: China Girl (Episode 3, Chapter 6)

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Creative Response

‘I do not want him to be comfortable. I do not want you to be comfortable … A table may stop. A heart may stop. Something.’

18

Hero or Victim? Dana Scully’s Complex Empowerment in The X-Files

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Video Essay

Robson presents conflicting perspectives on who Dana Scully is as a potential figure of female empowerment.

19

Reading the Feminist Dead Girl Show: HBO’s Sharp Objects

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Critical Reflection

By reading through Close and Kristeva, Cutchin parses her ambivalence towards Sharp Objects and other ‘dead girl’ shows.

20

The Emotional Detective: Gender, Violence and the Post-forensic TV Crime Drama

by & Amy Boyle

Critical Reflection

Lacking confidence, not stylish or capable, the emotional female detective has recently become an immensely popular TV character.

21

How to Make ‘Positive Moral’ Blaxploitation: Shaping the Black Female Detective in Get Christie Love!

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Critical Reflection

Get Christie Love! is as a test case demonstrating the limits of broadcasters to reconceive intersectional power relations in the 1970s.

22

‘Witchcraft is just a way of concentrating energy’: An Interview with Anna Biller

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Interview

Writer/Director of The Love Witch (2016), Anna Biller meets Kingsley Marshall to chat about writing women and challenging the patriarchy.

23

Placing the Queer Audience: Literature on Gender & Sexual Diversity in Film and TV Reception

by & Duc Dau

Critical Reflection

Cover & Dau provide an overview of existing scholarship on gender and sexually diverse Anglophone film and television media.

24

Sexual Objects, Sexual Subjects and Certified Freaks: Rethinking ‘Objectification’

by , Clarissa Smith , Alan McKee , John Mercer & Susanna Paasonen

Critical Reflection

Five authors consider responses to the music video WAP (2020) to argue that refusing ‘objectification’ as an organising concept might open up the analysis of a media text.

25

Uneven Surfaces and Happening Non-happenings: Navigating the Ordinary of Sexual Trauma

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Critical Reflection

Focussing on different TV series genres, Johnson develops a conceptual language with which to approach the affective lability of sexual trauma and violence.

26

Feedback As an Act of Love: How to Transform Storytelling By Listening to Others

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Critical Reflection

Hidalgo makes an argument for the immense value of viewing the experience of feedback as a gift, one that we can receive and offer to others.

27

Firewatching: Notes on ‘Leaving the Cinema’

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Critical Reflection

In 1975, Barthes confessed his love for cinema—the hypnotising space, today Bradbury-Rance ponders on the magic of the small screen.

28

(Re)Marks of Abuse: Gender Violence in Art by Women of Colour

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Critical Reflection

Ishii investigates the ways feminist artists of colour highlight diverse victims/survivors’ experiences of abuse to involve the viewer in the debate on gender and sexual violence.

29

Breaking the Abortion Taboo: Anne Zohra Berrached’s Film 24 Weeks

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Critical Reflection

24 Weeks (2016) depicts the complexity of a German couple’s decision to abort a foetus after prenatal tests diagnose a genetic disorder and organ defects.

30

Tracing Mendieta, Mendieta’s Trace: The Silueta Series (1973-1980)

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Critical Reflection

Nestor argues that Mendieta’s photographs pertain to a performativity, tracing multiplicity of the self across time, nations and exile.

31

Black-Love

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Creative Practice

Black Love poem will resonate with the black community, allowing for connection to uncomfortable feelings provoked by past and present injustices.

32

Invoking Kali

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Creative Practice

Invoking Kali draws on the Sanskrit genre of sacred stotra literature. The goddess Kali, whose name means Black or Death symbolises the dread and darkness of Time that she commands.

33

Self Portrait at 27

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Creative Practice

Sledmere’s poems offer shimmers of intersecting events and intimacies, felt in sensuous narrative potential dissolving into lyrical simultaneity.

34

A Heatseeking Erotics of Pleasurable Conversions—or, ‘Writing’

by

Creative Response

In this performative essay, Brown explores different registers of erotic writing, particularly the pleasures of writing for oneself.

35

Reading Volume 2 of ‘Fourth Wave Feminism in Science Fiction and Fantasy’

by

Book Review

Sweet reviews the collection of essays edited by Frankel which precisely documents new fourth wave feminist trends in representing women in TV.

36

This One Sky Day: How to See Light

by

Book Review

Sadri ruminates and reflects on This One Sky Day, the magical and important new novel by Leone Ross, and discusses the work with the author.

37

Reviewing ‘The New Feminist Literary Studies’

by

Book Review

Cooke’s collection of essays is a subversive intersectional chorus aiming to decipher the gendered ideologies of the Western culture.

38

Some Thoughts on Ince’s Study on Mia Hansen-Løve

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Book Review

Kate Ince’s book is a comprehensive study on Mia Hansen- Løve, documenting how her early career impacted the later practice of the filmmaker.

39

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WHO SUPPORTS US

The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.

However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:


Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers

Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey