“A bottom-up approach to transcultural identities: Petra and women detectives in Italian TV crime drama”

In her The TV Crime Drama, Turnbull (The TV Crime Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014) argues that “the portrayal of women in the crime drama series has served as an index of women’s changing role in society while providing a catalyst for debate, both in the popular press and in the field of feminist media studies”. Moving from these premises, our aim is to analyse the Italian series Petra (Sky 2020–) within the larger context of contemporary European TV crime productions, to investigate the recurrences, similarities, and differences in the construction, representation, and consumption of TV female detectives, through a conceptualization of what has been called “mediated cultural encounters” (Bondebjerg et al. Transnational European Television Drama: Production, Genres and Audiences. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). We consider Rosi Braidotti’s claim of the necessity of a “post nationalistic understanding of cultural identity” (2001) as a framework of analysis for the inter-related issues of gender, multiculturalism, and European identities.