Gateway Bodies: Serial Form, Genre, and White Femininity in Imported Crime TV

Abstract

In this article, I study transnational crime TV through a key recurring textual element—serial narrative—to understand how it creates terms of transnational legibility in a major import market, the United States. These programs’ serial form both suits the ecology of the U.S. post-network era and articulates aesthetic and ideological norms recognizable to U.S. audiences. Imported serial crime TV is tied to multiple genres and familiar tropes of gender and race, often relying on the discovery of white female victims to galvanize police investigations, serve as gothic spectacles, and animate family melodramas. DR’s Forbrydelsen exemplifies such complexly layered and “translatable” serial form. I argue that the aesthetics of this and other programs foreground raced female bodies to deterritorialize them, in the process creating a transnational lingua franca in crime TV. In repeatedly pairing such victims and female detectives, these shows ultimately also illuminate the place feminism itself occupies in transnational flow.