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1. Analytic Framework
- University of Illinois Press
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chapter 1 Analytic Framework In this chapter, we develop our framework for analyzing Prime Suspect. It is our intention that this framework serve as a benchmark for examining gender and justice issues in cultural productions, including film and television. In contrast to some cultural studies approaches that claim to avoid value assessments of fictional works, we adopt an approach that not only examines but advocates for works that promote hopes for and actions toward social justice. The first component of our framework rests on the idea that a feminist crime genre has emerged in the past few decades. As noted in the Introduction, the crime genre has historically either excluded women or presented them in subordinate and stereotypical roles. After this long, male-dominated history, the crime genre increasingly features women as producers of and protagonists in the genre. This change has altered the genre by decentering the domination of male protagonists and their methods for understanding and solving crimes. Scholars have identified other significant features of the emerging feminist crime genre: it looks beyond individuals to attend to structural roots of crime and related social problems; there tends to be less violence in such works; the protagonist demonstrates an ethic of responsibility toward victims in promoting just solutions to the case. We drew inspiration from these discussions of a feminist crime genre to develop a second and interrelated component of our framework of analysis, a model of what we call progressive moral fiction. Some scholars have called for an increasing identification and production of factual Cav_Jur RevPgs.indd 23 5/18/12 3:40 PM 24 chapter 1 and fictional/dramatic works that inspire others to do justice and transform unjust social arrangements. With regard to the crime genre, works of progressive moral fiction may include story lines that reveal the social systemic nature and context of criminal actions and that feature socially marginalized victims and a protagonist who understands the limitations of law and is dedicated to helping victims. We also draw on the work of other literary, feminist, and critical race theorists to formulate our ideal type model of progressive moral fiction. We will argue that our model can be used as a framework for media research and for using media to teach about gender and justice issues. The Feminist Crime Genre Despite a number of successful women contributors, the crime genre has been largely a male preserve. In her treatise on women detectives, Maureen Reddy (1988, 5) argues that the crime genre was characterized by disruption (the crime), linear progress toward order, the banishment of disruptive elements, and ultimately the preservation by a male authority of the bourgeois order and patriarchy. Reddy and other experts on women’s crime fiction (e.g., Munt 1994; Klein 1995) viewed the crime genre as a primarily conservative and masculine form that reinforced masculine dominance. The first fictional British woman police detective appeared in 1864 in a book called The Female Detective. The book was “edited” by Andrew Forrester , although Kathleen Klein (1995, 18) suggests that this was a fictional work, not a police casebook. The author variously referred to the protagonist as Miss or Mrs. Gladden and denied the audience details about her life as a woman so as to focus more on her portrayal as a detective (Klein 1995, 18). A second volume featuring a woman police detective quickly followed: W. Stephens Hayward’s The Experiences of a Lady Detective. The protagonist , a Mrs. Paschal, was a widow who joined the police force because she was lacking in income (Klein 1995, 24). These two volumes generated no immediate imitators in a woman’s subgenre. Women detectives appeared later in the nineteenth century in the United States as a part of the dime novel tradition. However, Klein (1995, 24) notes that there were very few woman-centered stories and that the men writers who featured women as protagonists tended to undercut them by foregrounding romance and marriage as events that would end the woman’s role as an investigator. Cav_Jur RevPgs.indd 24 5/18/12 3:40 PM [54.221.43.155] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:50 GMT) Analytic Framework 25 Thus, women appeared in the crime genre but did not alter the view that detection was a masculine pursuit (Munt 1994). There were no (or few) women investigators in the real world, so there was no believable environment for them in the crime genre (Klein 1992). Discussions of a women’s crime genre begin with...