Man’s Tongue, Woman’s Poison: Deadloch, A Feminist Crime Comedy in the Genre of Police Crime Drama

We argue that Deadloch transforms the conventions of the police crime drama into a feminist dark comedy that employs queer humor and “soft” methods of violence to expose and critique patriarchal, colonial, and heteronormative power structures. This study aims to analyze Deadloch, a feminist dark comedy, through multiple concepts such as discourse, gender, identity, colonial criticism, and justice. Analysis becomes possible at the intersection of these concepts. In the story set on the island, attempts are made to solve the serial murders and find the killer. In choosing the “island” spatially, its function as a closed microcosm in which social norms and power relations are reproduced is also foregrounded as a metaphor. The victims whose tongues are cut out in the murders are men. In the series where the displacement and redirection of gender identities are realized with humor, the main issue is to overcome binary oppositions such as public/private, female/male, emotion/reason, rational/irrational, love/hate, and pleasure/pain. These binary oppositions are tried to be overcome in a place where emotions are queerized. Emotions blur the fixity of identities, the performativity of masculinities, and the spatial traces of the colonial past in the stories of the series' characters, opening to the past and present. The series uses the cross-genre transitivity and captures this through humor to realize the feminist fantasy of justice. The conflict experienced in the town between the locals and the newcomers also shows the cultural embeddedness of hegemonic masculinity practices. The study asks, first, how humor functions in the aestheticization of crime and violence. Secondly, it asks how narrative structures that disrupt gender stereotypes invite the audience into a new ethico-political space and how social positions such as race, class, culture, and colonial memory intersect in this narrative where crime is coded with femininity. In the study, the method of feminist close reading is used in accordance with the concept of intersectionality, and multiple concepts (gender, identity, class, culture, culture, colonial memory) are analyzed along with the crime comedy under scrutiny. The conflict between conservatives and lesbians begins when two female detectives, Dulcie and Redcliffe, take on the murder. As the murder remains unsolved and the serial killer remains elusive, the polarization and conflict between the locals and the newcomers become more and more apparent, and the issues around sexual identity, class, and hegemonic masculinity become more and more visible.