The Portrayal of Female Criminalists in a Contemporary Czech Crime Series: Non-diversity Clause
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Crime television series belong to the most popular programming choices worldwide. Crime series changed (by diverse casting choices and genre hybridization) from the historically masculine genre into a genre for everyone. Female characters evolved from wives, mistresses and daughters of lead male heroes into their work partners or bosses. It might seem that previously peculiar position of women in this format is a distant history now. But is it really? Our conference contribution is based on a study of contemporary Czech crime TV series conducted from fall 2017 till spring 2019. In our research we studied Czech crime series and their (mainly) female criminalists, we were interested in their portrayal in this popular genre (the word popular is meant in quantitative way, it is based on the number of made original series and foreign acquisitions by Czech TV channels). In our research we analyzed all of the contemporary (2007-2017) TV series portraying female criminalists, each of the series was considered a special case, therefore we conducted 19 case studies. We also conducted additional 15 case studies of foreign TV series with significant heroines and used them for comparison. In our conference contribution we would like to focus on our findings concerned with identity diversity of Czech female criminalists or more correctly the lack of said diversity. We will introduce common portrayal schemes reflecting visual and behavioral aspects of presented heroines. Our goal is to point out that many crime series in Czech Republic are still a long way from equal and complex portrayal of identities, although there are significant exceptions. |