Between “Normalization” and Spectacularization: Representing Violence Against Women in TV Crime Series

This research in the field of Media Sociology and Gender Studies compares the representation of death and of female corpses in two crime TV series produced in the last decade in two very different contexts: the Italian series RIS – Delitti imperfetti (Canale 5) and the Irish one The Fall (BBC Northern Ireland). The interest for this theme is born out of the awareness of the gravity of a phenomenon such as gendered violence. The starting assumption here is that media representations play a key role in fueling or counteracting the culture that feeds gendered violence: this is true both for news media and fictional media, able to shape our social imaginary. At the basis of this research there are three questions: whether the violence, victims and perpetrators represented in media coincide with the actual reality of the above-mentioned countries; what kind of frame is the most commonly used to represent male violence against women; and whether violence itself and the dead female body are represented with any kind of eroticization or spectacularization. To answer these questions, I will carry out a quantitative and qualitative analysis, looking at Feminist Film Theory in order to resolve he last issue.