True crime as gendered self-surveillance: Anxiety, risk pedagogy and women’s mediated engagements with violence

This article examines true crime as a cultural form that organises gendered vigilance, anxiety and risk under contemporary conditions of mediated violence. Drawing on a theoretical and interpretive narrative review, it brings feminist theory into dialogue with psychoanalytic accounts of anxiety and repetition, critical approaches to self-governance and surveillance, cultural criminological scholarship on mediated transgression, and media analysis of digital circulation and participatory culture. The article argues that women’s engagements with true crime are usefully understood as an ambivalent form of gendered self-surveillance. Rather than reducing such engagements to morbid curiosity or straightforward empowerment, it conceptualises them as a mode of orientation to violence in which recognition, anticipation and symbolic rehearsal coexist with heightened vigilance and individualised responsibility for safety. True crime, in this account, operates as a pedagogy of risk: it makes danger narratable, retrospectively legible and affectively manageable, while also reinforcing the expectation that women must remain attentive to threat. The article contributes to cultural criminological scholarship on mediated crime by showing how true crime media participate in the affective and cultural management of gendered violence, and by demonstrating that the genre’s cultural power resides in the unstable relation between recognition and discipline, preparedness and capture.