Overlooking the Evidence: Gender, Genre and the Female Detective in Hollywood Film and TelevisionMurray, Kathleen (2014) Overlooking the Evidence: Gender, Genre and the Female Detective in Hollywood Film and Television. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. (Unpublished) This is the latest version of this item.
AbstractThe investigating woman, the female detective, or the lady crime solver has poses a productive problem throughout the history of Hollywood film and television. Investigating women fundamentally disrupt the scopic and narrative regimes upon which Hollywood genre films depend. I argue that the investigating woman changes the way that the detective genre operates in four distinct modalities: the Adventurer, the Avenger, the Comedic and the Affective. Each mode articulates the figure through sometimes unlikely generic combinations. And in each mode the investigator performs femininity with a different valence. The female investigator thus becomes a space to explore gender’s transformative effect on genre, different kinds of looking, and gender as performance. I examine what happens when films fail to evoke what Barry Langford calls the “generic unconscious.” Genres only work if they are recognized as genres, if they exist with a productive feedback loop between producers, texts and audiences. Films featuring women detectives do not activate the semantic and syntactic markers of the detective film. They are burdened with the adjectival. They are “women” detective films. And the “woman” part moves these films, sometimes forcibly, into other generic terrains: the woman’s picture, melodrama, horror, comedy, romance, adventure. Each chapter investigates a mode through close reading several transhistoric texts ranging from Sherlock, Jr. to Zero Dark Thirty that serve to illustrate the possibilities held within the modality. In my conclusion, I test my taxonomy in the laboratory of television where the figure moves through several modes in a single program, sometimes a single episode. From 1957’s Decoy to Veronica Mars, this fluidity is both the strength of investigating women in a genre that is powered by novelty, and a sign of the abiding lack of ease a woman who looks creates manifested on the level of genre. These modes do not solve the problem of the investigating woman in film, but rather make the problem explicit. The modes serve to expose the contours of the problem through the films’ failed attempts to resolve it. Share
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