Extreme Makeover CSI Edition: Tracing the Forensic Crime Drama's Engagement with Identity Crimes, Plastic Bodies and Self-Transformation Narratives

Abstract

This article examines discourses on identity and bodily plasticity in the forensic crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–). It argues that CSI engages with the same cultural debates as makeover reality TV, but in ways that articulate a number of oppositional perspectives on self-transformation practices governed by the programme's investment in an essentialist and determinist understanding of genetics. The article traces CSI's reconfiguration of the motif of disguise and inverted use of generic tropes from makeover reality TV, as well as its tendency to worry about the increased possibilities for biomedical alterations of our bodies. It concludes that the programme problematises self-transformation practices as a new type of ‘identity crime’.