Broken Bodies/Inquiring Minds: Women in Contemporary Transnational TV Crime Drama

Abstract

This special issue concentrates on a dominant trend in contemporary transnational crime television: quality dramas featuring serial criminals who break the bodies/psyches of young women or children, thereby attracting the inquiries of female detectives who have suffered trauma themselves. This trend has generated resources, industrial partnerships, avid viewers, and, importantly for the authors here, feminist commentary across continents. We reframe the debate over whether these shows are feminist or misogynist by exploring staples of transnational language that underwrite their popularity in disparate national markets. In fact, we address the paradoxical gender-based violence and female empowerment at their core as crucial to their transnational legibility by tracking recurring elements that circulate a gendered and raced lingua franca rooted in fundamentals of media aesthetics: strategies of storytelling and genre, modes of perception, and the production of affect. Ultimately, these programs raise questions about cultural currencies of televised feminism in the digital era.