Neither Voiceless Nor Unbelievable: Women Detectives and Rape Culture in Contemporary Italian TV

In 2020, Rai Fiction (the production branch of Italian public broadcaster Rai, the most relevant player in terms of investments in televisual production) and the production company Cattleya co-produced Voiceless (original title Bella da morire, Deadly Beautiful), a miniseries of 8 episodes centred on Eva Cantini, a police detective specialised in sex-based hate crimes, which in Italian are referred to as femminicidi (femicide): the killing of a woman, in particular by a man, on account of her gender. Eva Cantini is part of a growing numbers of televisual female detectives in recent American and European productions who disrupt assumptions related not only to the manliness of the detective profession, but also to the discursive meanings regarding gender relations, representation of gender violence, and the female gaze.