Published Article: MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture
A soiled hand, a ringed finger; the hint of a shoulder. An exposed breast. A lock of hair emerging from the dirt. Eyes closed in rest, or possibly open, bearing knowledge of the one who did this, knowledge that, for now, eludes we who look. Few figures titillate like the fictional corpse, whose body parts often come to us in bits and pieces. From Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) to the contemporary Dead Girl Show (Bolin 2018), crime narratives tend to display what G.S. Close calls a ‘necropornographic’ (2018) impulse. [1] In crime television today, the series’ inaugural dead body, so often female, acts as both ‘attention grabber and holder,’ both ‘hook and bond’. (Klinger 2018: 521) Her body is the enigma, the riddle, which the detective will go on to solve. That which we first see—breast, shoulder, leg—may never again appear on screen, but the memory of her flesh keeps us engaged, keeps us watching. Who could have done this?
