By Kathleen Murray B.A., George Mason University, 1997 M.A., New
OVERLOOKING THE EVIDENCE: GENDER, GENRE AND THE WOMAN DETECTIVE IN HOLLYWOOD FILM AND TELEVISION by Kathleen Murray B.A., George Mason University, 1997 M.A., New School University, 2003 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2014 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Kathleen Murray It was defended on April 23, 2014 and approved by Adam Lowenstein, Director of Film Studies, Associate Professor, Film Studies Mark Lynn Anderson, Associate Professor, Film Studies Brent Malin, Associate Professor, Communications Dissertation Advisor: Jane Feuer, Professor, Film Studies and English ii OVERLOOKING THE EVIDENCE: GENDER, GENRE AND THE WOMAN DETECTIVE IN HOLLYWOOD FILM AND TELEVISION Kathleen Murray, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2014 Copyright © by Kathleen Murray 2014 iii OVERLOOKING THE EVIDENCE: GENDER, GENRE AND THE WOMAN DETECTIVE IN HOLLYWOOD FILM AND TELEVISION Kathleen Murray, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2014 The investigating woman, the female detective, or the lady crime solver poses a productive problem throughout the history of Hollywood film and television. Investigating women fundamentally disrupt the scopic and narrative regimes upon which Hollywood genre films depend. I argue that the investigating woman changes the way that the detective genre operates in four distinct modalities: the Adventurer, the Avenger, the Comedic and the Affective. Each mode articulates the figure through sometimes unlikely generic combinations. And in each mode the investigator performs femininity with a different valence. The female investigator thus becomes a space to explore gender’s transformative effect on genre, different kinds of looking, and gender as performance.
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