This special issue concentrates on a dominant trend in contemporary transnational crime television: quality dramas featuring serial criminals who break the bodies/psyches of young women or children, thereby attracting the inquiries of female detectives who have suffered trauma themselves. This trend has generated resources, industrial partnerships, avid viewers, and, importantly for the authors here, feminist commentary across continents. We reframe the debate over whether these shows are feminist or misogynist by exploring staples of transnational language that underwrite their popularity in disparate national markets. In fact, we address the paradoxical gender-based violence and female empowerment at their core as crucial to their transnational legibility by tracking recurring elements that circulate a gendered and raced lingua franca rooted in fundamentals of media aesthetics: strategies of storytelling and genre, modes of perception, and the production of affect. Ultimately, these programs raise questions about cultural currencies of televised feminism in the digital era.

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This essay argues that in extending the audiovisual convention of “thinking music” and focusing it on the traumatized mind of the female detective, crime series such as Top of the Lake (2013–), Marcella (2016–), and From Darkness (2015–) present female knowledge as fundamentally emotional, even irrational. In these series, the female detective is victimized, traumatized, troubled, and her thinking music is distorted, discordant, affectively charged. Arguing that the female detective’s “thinking” music moves away from the forensic mode’s “showing and telling” and toward “listening” as an investigatory model, this essay posits a sonic turn that recalibrates the genre’s engagement with the female victim along affective and emotional lines. Analyzing this trope, this essay connects the female detective’s sonically defined emotional investment to transnational crime drama’s self-reflexive strategies of affective legibility.

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