The Heroic Monster: Dexter, Masculinity, and Violence

In this essay, I advance a reading of Dexterthe character and seriesthat 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 televisiona context filled with police and forensic shows, murder, and hyperbolically violent (and masculine) menin 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.