Archive for June 2021

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[Commlist] MAI issue 7: Female Detectives on TV

Tue Jun 15 06:46:49 GMT 2021


New MAI issue 7
on the female detective on TV alongside other miscellaneous articles, reviews and interviews related to MAI's themes and interests.

This was co-edited with Jessica Ford and Tanya Horeck.

https://maifeminism.com/issues/mai-issue-7-female-detectives/

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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.


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