Women in Crime: an analysis of the portrayal of female leads in American and Dutch crime dramas.

Abstract

This thesis offers an analysis of females in leading roles in crime dramas from two different countries, researching whether the females in the series are portrayed differently. As the series come from two different cultures, it is expected that different images are used for the portrayel of the female as images in the series can be identified as a countries self-images. It is also expected that some images are stereotypical images of females. A qualitative contrastive method is used which looks at a corpus of six series: three from America and three from the Netherlands.The research reveals that there is indeed a difference in portrayal of the female lead, with a more stereotypical portrayal in the USA and a less stereotypical portrayal in the Netherlands.