Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture: Gender, Crime, and Science. by Lindsay Steenberg (review)

"You see but you do not observe. The distinction is clear."¹ As Sherlock Holmes, the fictional detective, chastises his companion John Watson for failing to properly read the evidence before him, so Lindsay Steenberg urges readers toward a critical awareness of the subgenre that Holmes originates: the forensic. According to Steenberg, "contemporary popular culture is experiencing a forensic turn," in which "forensic procedurals dominate television and forensic-inspired procedures appear in art galleries, museums, toy stores, talk shows, and cookbooks" (1). Though this claim will be uncontroversial to anyone versed in popular culture, Steenberg intervenes to subject popular representations of forensic science to a rigorous investigation, focusing especially on the gender politics that underlie its many manifestations. Drawing on a diverse range of primary sources, Steenberg convincingly argues that gender is a central concern of the forensic genre, as it relies on "the spectacle of the gendered body (whether corpse or expert)" for much of its appeal (14).

To distinguish the highly mediated version of the field that appears on screen from the actual use of science in criminal justice, Steenberg introduces the term "tabloid forensic science". She describes tabloid forensic science as "nostalgic, hyperreal, composite, and visually stylized" and its relation to the practice of forensic science as "tangential, pastiched, and simulated" (9). The forensic occupies spaces of the crime scene, the morgue, and the lab, drawing equally on the Gothic and the hypermodern to frame spectacular displays of technological expertise and scientific reasoning. Representative shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Bones confront viewers with violent crimes indicative of an increasingly chaotic and dangerous society, while reassuringly presenting forensic science as the authoritative means by which to obtain truth and preserve order. To understand the context in which the forensic has gained this authority, Steenberg builds on Mark Seltzer's concept of "wound culture" and Toby Miller's "risk society" as they intersect with a postfeminist media culture that celebrates individual empowerment and denies feminist frameworks for interpreting female victimhood (10, 11).

Steenberg's sustained attention to gender politics fills a gap in theories of the forensic. Through a feminist analysis of film and television representations, Steenberg constructs a detailed portrait of the figure of "postfeminist female investigator." Steenberg traces this conflation to the forensic's borrowing from the Gothic. As female investigators are doubled with the victims of the crimes they investigate, their success in crime-solving tends to depend on "female forensic intuition" derived from experience of or empathy with victimhood (63). This differs from male investigators, who are more often doubled with the killers they seek and whose success depends almost solely on scientific expertise. Additionally, Steenberg argues, the forensic subgenre's tendency to subject the corpse of the female victim to the intrusive gaze of criminalist and audience alike, through the spectacle of the autopsy, finds a double in its tendency to dissect the gendered body and behavior of the female investigator, most often through the critiques of male and female partners. In all cases, tabloid forensics turns to the female body for evidence of "crime."

Not confined to its origin in crime stories, the forensic gaze wanders across genres and media scrutinizing the female body and policing gendered behavior. Steenberg's consideration of our broader cultural investment in the forensic aesthetic and epistemology marks another major contribution made by this study. This approach allows readers to see how tabloid forensics, in all its forms, serves to legitimize depictions of graphic violence and violated (often female) bodies as sophisticated, scientific, and educational. Across the span of the book, Steenberg reveals affinities between "retrofitted" stories of Jack the Ripper's crimes that reduce London to "a murder museum" and relegate the individual human lives of his victims to displays of horrifically mutilated bodies; "blockbuster" CSI-sponsored museum exhibits aimed at young people and featuring simulated victims of violent crime; and the use of live autopsy on a morbidly obese body as...