This article examines true crime as a cultural form that organises gendered vigilance, anxiety and risk under contemporary conditions of mediated violence. Drawing on a theoretical and interpretive narrative review, it brings feminist theory into dialogue with psychoanalytic accounts of anxiety and repetition, critical approaches to self-governance and surveillance, cultural criminological scholarship on mediated transgression, and media analysis of digital circulation and participatory culture. The article argues that women’s engagements with true crime are usefully understood as an ambivalent form of gendered self-surveillance. Rather than reducing such engagements to morbid curiosity or straightforward empowerment, it conceptualises them as a mode of orientation to violence in which recognition, anticipation and symbolic rehearsal coexist with heightened vigilance and individualised responsibility for safety. True crime, in this account, operates as a pedagogy of risk: it makes danger narratable, retrospectively legible and affectively manageable, while also reinforcing the expectation that women must remain attentive to threat. The article contributes to cultural criminological scholarship on mediated crime by showing how true crime media participate in the affective and cultural management of gendered violence, and by demonstrating that the genre’s cultural power resides in the unstable relation between recognition and discipline, preparedness and capture.
This chapter examines the enduring cultural impact of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs and Jonathan Demme’s film adaptation, alongside Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs, through the rarely examined angle of dark humour studies. While such films are not comedies broadly speaking, this chapter maintains that Demme and Perkins’ tactical exploitation of the incongruity, superiority and relief theories offer a mixed model framework for comprehending the sustained popularity of their darkly iconic characters, while simultaneously engendering a complex, disturbing emotional experience in which viewers oscillate between laughter, terror, and sorrow. The analysis considers how fictional serial killers reflect and satirise contemporary anxieties around the patriarchy, gender discrimination, child trafficking and exploitation and the rise of far-right politics and fascism, by drawing troubling parallels with bygone and current world leaders such as Reagan, Trump, Musk, Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Farage. Through a comparative case study of Hannibal Lecter, Jame Gumb and Long Legs, this article demonstrates how postmodern cinematic monsters operate as sites of cultural contradiction and incongruity, fusing charisma and horror to sustain their disturbing appeal and relevance in contemporary media.
Digital platforms have amplified the capacity for individuals to document, perform, and circulate images of themselves engaged in criminal offending. Perpetrators can influence public perceptions of criminality through viral visibility, deliberately crafting content to provoke, attract attention, or assert presence within platform affordances. Through critical discourse analysis of parliamentary debates and media commentary, this article analyses the ‘posting and boasting’ phenomena, a new legal category in some Australian jurisdictions that treats the online visibility of certain crimes as a distinct form of offending. With a focus on the Australian jurisdiction of New South Wales, the article applies Baudrillard’s theory of simulation to interrogate the conditions under which the criminal law begins to regulate representations of crime rather than the crime itself. It argues that the New South Wales ‘performance crime’ offence of posting and boasting emerged through unreasonable legislative decision-making, and re-ordered crime and responsibility through a contested moral hierarchy. As such, the criminalisation of posting and boasting in New South Wales reflects criminal law operating as simulation, where the appearance of crime control is substituted for its practice.
The 2008 Noida double murder of Aarushi Talwar and Hemraj Banjade can be understood as a curious amalgam of unsolvability, sensationalism, and moral polarization that defined post-millennial India. This article attempts a close reading of two Hindi films on the Aarushi-Hemraj murder case, namely Rahasya (Mystery, 2015) and Talvar (The Sword, 2015), using the insights of cultural criminology in order to understand the politics of interpretation surrounding the double homicide. Over the years, the case has acquired notoriety for the competing versions of the possible course of events and culprits among various investigative teams, media houses, and the general public. Drawing attention to the antithetical narrative strategies as well as the dichotomous mobilization of justice-injustice figures in these two films, the paper indexes the pervasive presence of dominant cultural anxieties vis- & agrave; -vis gender, class, and religion in post-liberalization India. Subsequently, it will also demonstrate how the complex configuration of fact and fiction in the Aarushi-Hemraj murder case, combined with the socio-cultural prejudices (as portrayed within the diegetic spaces of these two movies), contributes to the creation of a hermeneutical palimpsest where multiple versions of a single crime coexist.
This reflexive essay introduces the Crime-Narrative Complex (CNC), a descriptive and analytical concept for understanding how lived experience stories of crime, punishment, trauma, and desistance become curated, circulated, and commodified across criminal justice, reform, academic, and media environments. Drawing on desistance theory, narrative criminology, and reflexive theorising informed by lived experience, the article examines how institutional and digital platform cultures shape narrative recognition by privileging particular forms of storytelling. The CNC highlights how narratives of redemption, resilience, trauma, accountability, and structural critique can become stabilised through organisational agendas, digital visibility, and professional storytelling economies. Rather than prescribing a singular moral grammar, the article examines how lived experience narratives are shaped through institutional demands for coherence, authenticity, and public intelligibility. In doing so, the CNC offers a conceptual vocabulary for analysing the political economy of contemporary crime storytelling and the conditions under which particular narratives become publicly credible, professionally valuable, and widely circulated.
This paper explores the social construction of victims by triangulating literature on gender hegemony, the Final Girl horror film trope, and the real-world ‘ideal victim’ construct. It may thus be of value to those interested in film analysis, responses to victims of crime, and challenging social norms. It is argued that social and criminal justice understandings of who is worthy of victim status and survival draw on invisible criteria relating to idealised understandings of victims that are themselves underpinned by idealised understandings of gender. Only a tiny number of exceptional cases can meet such idealised criteria resulting in poor responses to victims. Attempts to improve victims’ experiences must therefore be negotiated relative to those gendered victim ‘ideals’ and change can only be attritional. Final Girl may be understood as an attritional tool that can help erode idealised understandings of gender and victimisation, but that continues to be contained by them. A new phase of attrition involving a conscious, collaborative, degendered valorisation of strength and empathy is suggested.
Communication and information technologies continue to shape political movements in increasingly abstract ways, demonstrated by far-right violence blurring with memetic digital styles. Building on this, I apply insights from postphenomenology to examine how social media platforms mediate the vernacular practices of far-right users, with a specific focus on right-wing Discord communities. I illuminate practices related to a genre of memes called ‘fashwave’, a bricolage of the vaporwave aesthetic and fascistic iconography. I suggest that fashwave memes magnify a nostalgic worldview whilst inhibiting other kinds of affective modalities, in turn producing a collectively felt sense of community which resonates with Griffin’s conception of fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism . Not all consumers of fashwave memes on Discord turn to fascism, however. As multidimensional cultural artefacts, fashwave memes stabilise in relation to the overarching orientation of Discord, and the motivations of individual users. Here, by attending to forms of macro-mediation and micro-mediation, I argue that the platform’s affordances invite particular action scripts that, when interpreted by far-right community members, activate sensorial resonances which translate into harm. Through this translation, vernacular practices like proliferating fashwave memes are rearticulated by far-right users as mechanisms to symbolically align with the nation by undertaking a contemporary palingenetic struggle.
Not all social harms announce themselves. This research note introduces the concept of faceless harms: injuries to an individual’s lifetime wellbeing that victims never consciously experience. These harms foreclose opportunities, shape trajectories, and quietly lower the ceiling of what a life might have been. Because they are not recognised, they often evade help-seeking and collective mobilisation, folding into business as usual. Drawing on examples including reputational damage from doxxing, and allocative harms produced by algorithmic social sorting, I argue that faceless harms expose an experiential bias within social harm and criminological scholarship and reveal a form of injury that can be particularly resistant to recognition and redress.
At demonstrations and uprisings throughout the world, police and military mete out punishment via a particular form of violence that is designed not to kill, but rather to maim. This paper examines this understudied dimension of the police power in the phenomena of blinding those who stare back at police, including journalists and civilians. While visuality, the relationship between power, knowledge, and seeing, proscribes or prohibits what visual theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff terms the right to look, maiming functions as a means of pacification against staring, debilitating individuals with often permanent injuries and scars as well as populations through having to suffer distorted versions of life, what queer theorist Jasbir Puar refers to as the sovereign right to maim. Subsequently, the state and its police tell us how to look. When we deviate from its visuality and commands of "Move along, nothing to see here," we expose ourselves to potential debilitation, often through "less lethal" means. However, when police tell us there is nothing to see, we must not avert our attention but continue to embody the right to look. Otherwise, we lose the possibility of staring quite literally and with it, the power of the (counter-)visual.
