Abstract
Taffe Kommissarinnen und emanzipierte Kommissare? by Raphaela Tkotzyk is a recent addition to the work that needs to be done both on German television and on gender stereotypes in mass and/or pop culture. The book’s title translates to ‘Tough [female] Inspectors and Emancipated [male] Inspectors?’ and from the start emphasises one of the book’s foci – on gendered language in contemporary German crime shows; while the English ‘inspectress’ is largely out of use, the German language more often allows for the gendered terminology of professions. As well as language, each case study includes analyses of costumes and actions. Additionally, the book offers informative overviews on police inspectors on German TV since the 1960s, always tying the work back to the main question of the text: Do these fictional characters fall into traditional gender stereotypes or can they create a new understanding and plurality of gender roles?
The book’s three main examples, all from the German private TV channel RTL, present either two male inspectors ( Alarm für Cobra 11, 1996–-present), a male/female team (in the Alarm für Cobra 11 spin-off series Einsatz für Team 2 (2003–2005)) or two female inspectors ( Doppelter Einsatz (1994–2007)). While the programmes are comparable in terms of their genre, writing and context, they offer a variety of modes of speech, clothing, actions and habits to be analysed and discussed. Tkotzyk uses the pilot episodes of each show, focusing on the introductions of the characters and their first meetings, as well as selected scenes from later episodes to convey her points. The quoted dialogues and the images provided (though unfortunately all slightly skewed out of shape) convey the arguments well and allow the reader to examine the programmes along with the author. Analysis of these scenes provides clear insights into the stereotypes which the shows use to quickly establish familiar constructs of masculinity and femininity. But a clear strength of the book is the way it shows how deviations from these established gender roles can give the characters more depth and range through the adoption of ‘gender a-typical behaviour’.
Methodologically, the book relies strongly on sociological understandings of gender stereotypes and on linguistic studies of gendered patterns of speech which are comparable in English- and German-speaking countries. The scholarly context of these approaches is nicely and compactly presented to the reader, mostly in the book’s second chapter on conceptual framing which lays the base for the close readings which follow. Even though the book is clearly not based in Television Studies, its approach towards television from a different academic angle may advance the inherently interdisciplinary work in this area. Unfortunately, this also means that certain chapters did not profit from the research already done in television studies such as on ‘audiencing’ (Fiske, 1992), on female audiences since the 1940 (such as Herzog, (1941) 2004), on television as women’s culture’ (Brown, 1990), on female duos like Cagney & Lacey (D’Acci, 1994), on cop shows and police drama as a genre (Sabin et al, 2015), or, more specifically for the German context, on other historic work in the area (Hartmann, 2003).
The third chapter narrows in on the changing image of the male German TV investigator, from the father figure with mainly male colleagues and subordinates to a more rebellious, grubby kind of inspector, before honing in on detectives Semir Gerkhan and Ben Jäger in Cobra 11. Tkotzyk’s close reading of essential scenes emphasises her arguments on how manliness is defined precisely through its opposition to femininity and shows how the very confrontational first meeting of the two protagonists sets the tone for their action-packed work of policing the German Autobahn A57 near Cologne. Robin Lakoff’s linguistic concept of ‘rough talk’ (1973) proves relevant for all three case studies, especially in Chapter four which turns towards female TV inspectors and their tropes, from butch to housewives (‘Von Mannsweibern und Hausfrauen’). The fictional character Sabrina Nikolaidou, as the constant in the changing duos, is a fascinating case study that speaks not only to the central aspects of televised gender tropes but also (like Gerkhan) towards topics of migration and nationality. Generally, Tkotzyk’s observations about changes in clothes and hair, in rhetoric, and in colleagues/cast are especially insightful for answering the question: ‘how much of the social construction of fictional TV investigators follows traditionally female gender stereotypes and is a new understanding of gender roles created?’ (p. 140).
Writing about stereotypes, gender roles and the attached tropes and clichés can lead authors into reiterations of these same prejudices, rather than into deconstructing them. Tkotzyk, for example, locates the characters of her case studies on a spectrum of femininity but hardly questions this spectrum as such. The author’s stance towards quoted literature is at times unclear, making this book less political than it could have been, and Tkotzyk’s decision not to use the German conditional when paraphrasing her sources leads to a lack of distance from problematic statements and views. To readers, this may seem irritating, as may the failure to make a distinction between women/actress/role (and of course men/actors/roles). When considering aspects of dialogue, a greater knowledge of approaches to gendered language in playwriting or screenwriting might have proven helpful.
The fifth and last chapter turns towards the male and female duo on Alarm für Cobra 11: Einsatz für Team 2, asking whether this might open up plural gender identities. While this is not the case, as the analysis shows, the female inspector’s use of masculinity in situations where femininity ‘no longer suffices’ (p. 255) is an interesting point that should be explored further, as the author herself suggests in the conclusion. Overall the book is a sound study of past and current TV investigators in German television and, despite the German focus in the examples and statistical data, the book’s premise could easily be transported to other shows and national contexts. Future work on gender roles and stereotypes especially in crime shows would benefit from considering the key questions of this study regarding language and costuming.