Representing Female Detectives in Turkish Police Procedurals

Abstract

Police procedural has been historically perceived as a dominantly masculine genre for continually revolving around the investigations of male police officers. In accordance with the patriarchal norms that pervade Turkish society, local variations of the police procedural genre have conveniently appropriated this globally known convention and left little room for female detectives in their narratives. However, whenever they got a chance to be included in this male-dominated universe, female detectives have been frequently depicted as relatively independent women but also submitted to the traditional norms of womanhood in an ambivalent manner. This chapter examines this hesitant position of female police detectives in three contemporary Turkish police procedurals, Kanıt (The Evidence, 2010-2013), Cinayet (The Killing, 2014) and S?ahsiyet (Personality, 2018), by building connections between the interest of police procedural genre in feminist debates in the global context and the influence of this interest on local variations. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020, corrected publication 2021.