“When She Cracks”: The Visual (Re)Construction of “Deadly Women” in Infotainment Media

Abstract

Mass media narratives about criminalized women, especially those who are convicted of committing acts of violence, have historically relied on gendered stereotypes to make sense of women’s criminality. These stereotypes are particularly problematic when they are invoked within infotainment media a genre that combines information and entertainment. Since infotainment (mis)represents itself as primarily factual, the ideological messages that are disseminated through such televised media are more likely to be taken at face value and to be perceived as truthful to an unquestioning audience. This research examines how visual aspects of infotainment media such as the camera angle, zoom, exceptional use of black and white imagery, and the subject’s gaze, combine with audio narration and dialogue to create particularly powerful (audio)visual (re)presentations of violent women and girls. This article presents some of the findings from a larger qualitative content analysis of the televised infotainment series Deadly Women that were chosen as a case study. The ways in which visual film conventions are used to (re)produce images of female subjects as crazed, frenzied, emotionally out of control, and ultimately as simultaneously mad and bad are examined.