Crimes in Media Narratives

Abstract

This article is set up to multiple goals which all come around the concept of ‘narratives’. Though extensive, the research on narratives in general, especially literary ones, will be sieved through so that essential, relevant information is presented to the support of this article’s hypothesis. It firstly postulates the idea that narratives in general and media narratives in particular play an important role in the (re)production of dominant discourses and secondly, it claims a socially perpetuated, rarely acknowledged, linguistically implemented and reflected representation of social actors (in our case, criminals) in media based on the gender criterion. In other words, this article intends to prove that media narratives on criminals suffer ‘gender alterations’ to the clear detriment of female criminals without ignoring though the gender of the narrative’s producer on the one hand and the kind of publication that publishes the narrative on the other hand.