Female Detective on Post-Network Televison

Mother, Maiden, Cop

Female Detective on Post-Network Televison cover

Female Detective on Post-Network Televison

Mother, Maiden, Cop

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Pre-order. Available 22 Jan 2026
$144.00 RRP $160.00 Website price saving $16.00 (10%)

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Description

In this book, Alison Wielgus examines the figure of the female detective on global television over the last twenty years, situating this figure within a growing transnational circulation of crime television. Through its focus on the female detective, this book explores issues of familial trauma, sexual assault, policing, and national identity to argue for a radicalization of crime television that incorporates discourses of restorative justice and a feminist ethics of care.

By separating female post-network television detectives from the police procedural and grounding these arguments in narrative evolutions of post-network television, Wielgus considers the role of victims and of the larger support networks of care around female detectives, especially as questions about the ongoing nature of trauma in the investigation of rape and homicide cases and the effectiveness of police arise in serialized contexts.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: True Detectives
1. “I Keep on Piling on Bodies, on Bodies, on Bodies”: The Post-network Television Female Detective's Prerogatives and Progenitors
2. “A Terrible Mother, A Great Mother”: Maternal Melodrama and the Female Detective
3. Unhappy Families: Networks of Trauma and Culpability in Post-network Female Detective Television
4. Traffic in Bodies: Transnational Victims
5. “Neither Tarnished Nor Afraid”: True Crime and the Female Detective
6. Return to the Scene of the Crime: Radicalizing the Female Detective
Conclusion: “Who will find us, if the girl detective does not?”
Bibliography
Appendix: List of Post-network Television Shows Featuring Female Detectives
Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 22 Jan 2026
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 1
ISBN 9781666919301
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions Not specified
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Alison Wielgus

Alison Wielgus is Associate Professor of Media Stu…

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