'A good body': the case of/for feminist media studies

The figure of the embodied speaker has been central within feminist media and cultural studies and has been central theoretically to questions of how, when and where women can speak with authority. It has also been central to the feminist study of film and television representations in which women have been seen as simultaneously absent as subjects of discourse and overpresent as bodies/images. This article traces the connections between these issues and asks how we should view the recent emergence of the female professor investigator as a hero of popular film and television. It argues that these lecturer detectives are both figures of anxiety ¿ embodying concerns about a perceived feminization of the public sphere ¿ and transgressive figures. In their troubling and embarrassing tendency to evade containment and to speak from a position of embodied difference, they also offer an alter ego for the feminist academic.