Frills and thrills—pleasurable dissections and responses to the abject: Female pathology and anthropology in Déjà Dead and Silent Witness

Abstract

The female pathologist/anthropologist is a relatively recent fictional construct: a clinical sleuth whose relationship with the dead body shifts the importance of the detective/hero figure to the sidelines, foregrounding the abject as an empowering force for women. Both Dr Temperance Brennan and Dr Sam Ryan re-appropriate the fragmented body as a means of demonstrating the liberating potential of gendered performance. The excess of violence—and violence of excess—inform their bloody agendas and, drawing attention to the masquerade of medical discourses, they resist and redefine the constraints of both their gender and their professions. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's work on the abject and Creed's work on the horror genre, this paper will investigate some of the 'meanings' generated by these debates and suggest that representations of sanctioned mutilation in both the novel and the television series open new and problematic areas of investigation when it is a woman who is brandishing the knife. My argument is that Kristeva's use of psychoanalysis and her theories on the abject allow women to embrace simultaneously the two worlds of 'frills' and 'thrills', threatening to dissolve the boundaries between the two.