The Heroic Monster: Dexter, Masculinity, and Violence

摘要

In this essay, I advance a reading of Dexter-the character and series-that focuses on the complicated ways that the construction of normative masculinity serves to define, and sometimes legitimate, certain types of violence. I demonstrate that the show locates violence within a series of masculine homosocial realms in order to highlight Dexter's alienation from these spaces and, thus, his "monstrosity." I am interested in achieving two things with this reading. First, I want to pay extended attention to Dexter's location within the representational context of contemporary television-a context filled with police and forensic shows, murder, and hyperbolically violent (and masculine) men-in order to articulate what this program is doing differently. Second, I want to use Dexter as a means of thinking about the ways that violence and gender become linked through representational practices in ways that visibly and invisibly constitute social and gender norms.