Louise Wattis – författare

True crime is a huge cultural industry: media organisations use crime stories to push sales and clicks. Yet behind this phenomenon lies the real-life victims and a disconnect between the representation of violent crime and its reality.This book is a go-to guide for students and researchers in understanding the development of this phenomenon and its social and cultural impacts. Through case studies including Lucy Letby, the Yorkshire Ripper and Fred and Rosemary West, the book considers true crime’s ethical implications and its wider influence on crime and punishment.

True crime is a huge cultural industry: media organisations use crime stories to push sales and clicks. Yet behind this phenomenon lies the real-life victims and a disconnect between the representation of violent crime and its reality.This book is a go-to guide for students and researchers in understanding the development of this phenomenon and its social and cultural impacts. Through case studies including Lucy Letby, the Yorkshire Ripper and Fred and Rosemary West, the book considers true crime’s ethical implications and its wider influence on crime and punishment.

Interest in true crime as a form of popular entertainment has sky-rocketed in recent years. Drawing on this current popularity and its significance in the context of digital culture, Gender, True Crime and Criminology challenges traditional definitions of the genre, expanding representations of victimhood and how we understand true crime audiences in gendered terms.Tackling male consumption of true crime and exploring texts which might appeal to men as consumers, Louise Wattis reveals a new opportunity to analyse representations of masculinity, class and violence, as well as how male audiences engage with cultural portrayals of these violent subjects. Embracing the breadth of the true crime genre, including features such as online engagement, sexual violence and the figure of the murdered woman, chapters critically analyse themes of gender, masculinity, race and class, as well as their representations in victim/survivor-centred documentaries. Situating wider debates within the renewed mainstream focus on violence against women, chapters also raise timely questions around ethics and the nature of victim visibility.Recognising the value of popular criminology as an academic resource, this is a much-needed text for advancing contemporaneous debates around the importance and diversity of true crime.

Combining research findings from oral history interviews, analysis of popular criminological texts and academic commentary, this volume explores what the case can tell us about feminism, fear of crime, gender and serial murder and the representation of victims and sex workers.