The next speakers in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow are Ella Duncan and Avery Fraser, whose focus is on true crime content’s gendered constructions of mothers who kill. Media representations of violence against women tend to reproduce gender inequalities, and this remains true for digital forms of such content.
True crime podcasting is a genre dominated by women, who present themselves as feminists, yet it remains riddled with misogynist tropes and stereotypes; this applies especially also to the women who committed homicides who may be covered in such podcasts. This project addresses three such homicide cases (covering two women and one man who murdered family members), across three multi-episode true crime podcasts. It coded each podcast across multiple criteria to explore their themes and framings.
Women who commit violent acts are on trial both for those acts as well as their violation of gender norms; they are variously portrayed as mad (evil and monstrous), bad (sychopathic and insane), and sad (foolish and brainwashed).
The podcasts framed the women who committed domestic homicides as failed and inherently flawed mothers: selfish, cold, uncaring, and unnatural; judged against ideals of motherhood and femininity (while the man was judged for the crime itself, but not against ideals of fatherhood or masculinity); and positioned via gendered stereotypes.
Podcasts are independent entities which choose their cases because of a calculation that they will captivate an audience; this reproduces sensationalist tropes and engages in blatantly sexist tropes and harmful misogyny, sometimes using highly offensive language. This emphasises a post-feminist sensibility which draws on feminist achievements to legitimise the use of highly misogynistic coverage. Truly feminist coverage would avoid such sexist commentary.
