A Pathological Romance: Authority, Expert Knowledge and the Postfeminist Profiler

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, behavioural science has become a key element in telling stories about crime. The pseudo-scientific system of profiling, in which the crime scene and personal history of the suspect are used to hypothesize violent behaviour, is so ubiquitous that it has become a cultural commonplace. Profiling’s cultural currency depends on truths which are formulated and gendered in ways that might be described as “postfeminist”, and this is rendered especially apparent in the characterization of the female criminal profiler. This figure, after all, embodies an expert knowledge that she uses to combat an archetypal postmodern villain: the serial killer.¹ This chapter examines the gender politics of the now-conventional relationship between the postfeminist female investigator and the male serial killer — two figures who are inextricably connected in the popular imaginary. This sexualized and romanticized coupling simultaneously constructs and challenges the female investigator’s expertise, making wider pathological observations about female experts whose professional struggles are effectively and implicitly reduced to a tension between their female bodies and their ability to do their jobs.