A (des)construção do serial killer em Meu amigo Dahmer, na Darkside

O presente estudo pretende analisar a novela gráfica Meu amigo Dahmer, publicada pela editora brasileira DarkSide. Propomos discutir as diferentes maneiras pelas quais o autor da obra utiliza os recursos linguísticos da banda desenhada para desconstruir a imagem do protagonista — o famoso serial killer norte-americano Jeffrey Dahmer. Analisamos, depois, o livro-objeto produzido pela DarkSide, considerando as opções editoriais que transformaram essa versão brasileira de My friend Dahmer em uma obra original com a assinatura da editora.This study aims to analyze the graphic novel Meu amigo Dahmer, released by the Brazilian publishing house DarkSide. We propose a discussion of the different ways by which the author uses the linguistic resources of comics to deconstruct the protagonist's image — the well-known American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. We analyze the physical book produced by DarkSide as well, considering the editorial choices that have transformed the Brazilian edition of My friend Dahmer into an original artwork with its own personal touch.Mestrado em Estudos Editoriai

Disney Channel Serial Killers

The appearance of actors Zac Efron and Ross Lynch, known for their roles as teenagers on popular Disney Channel productions, as serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer in the films Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile and My Friend Dahmer has raised questions about the effects of these portrayals on the Generation Z demographic. How does having these former Disney Channel actors portray these serial killers affect the way that Generation Z views Bundy and Dahmer? Through examining movie reviews by both professional critics and audience members, as well as social media posts on websites such as Twitter, Tumblr, and Tiktok, this thesis attempts to gain an insight into how and why these killers have become such a popular topic of conversation in society today, particularly among Generation Z. Furthermore, this thesis suggests that further research on these media portrayals of serial killers as well as inaccurate depictions of mental illness across many television series and movies is necessary to explain how the constant bombardment of serial killer media affects society as a whole

Othered Ambitions: The Conflation of Villainy and Homosexuality in 20th Century American Media

This work sets out to examine the ways in which homosexuality and villainy have been conflated throughout the 20th Century in American media, and the ways in which that conflation has been reinforced and challenged. My observations about the villainous connotations of homosexuality hold despite the ways in which the boundaries of homosexuality have changed throughout the century. A homosexual is anyone who experiences romantic or amorous affection for someone who presents with the same gender presentation and/or who experiences attraction aversion for those who present with the opposite gender presentation. A villain breaks the law seeking to restructure society or to continue to question the moral expectations of that society; they appear disaffected to a greater degree, and their animosity towards society is less understood because that animosity points to the systemic injustices in power structures that that society benefits from obfuscating; homosexualized villains seek to destroy or upend societies that have admonished them for their homosexuality, the impetus of which cannot be understood without acknowledging that the society they are attacking is rigidly heterosexual—a power structure that their society has hidden.The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, published in 1955, is a novel that epitomizes the conflation of homosexuality and villainy. It remains unclear to readers whether Tom Ripley is villainous because he is harboring the secret of his homosexuality. Highsmith’s novel is a psychological thriller in which Tom Ripley poses as a friend of Dickie Greenleaf to receive funds to travel to Europe to bring Dickie back to his parents in America, Tom’s homoerotic attraction to Dickie and his lavish lifestyle derail this mission, causing Tom to murder Dickie and assume his identity. In this chapter, I perform close readings of Highsmith’s novel to examine the ways in which gender fatalism, homosocial desire, and cruel optimism permeate the text. Gender fatalism, homosocial desire, and cruel optimism are utilized to reposition the novel as well as two film remakes of the novel, Purple Noon (also known as Plein Soleil) and The Talented Mr. Ripley to create excellent examples of homosexualized villainy. Another Country by James Baldwin and Vanishing Rooms by Melvin Dixon depict a continuation of the conflation of villainy and homosexuality while layering conceptions of race as othered and vilifying as well. African-American literature in the 20th Century describes Black experiences that are tangled with issues of racial inequality that grew from racial structures developed in the 19th and 18th centuries to explain, affirm, and uphold a society whose top echelon benefitted from the ideologies of white supremacy, and are therefore extensions or prodigies of slave narratives. In Another Country, Rufus’ disaffection by society speaks to his homosexualized villainy, while Dixon’s response novel Vanishing Rooms portrays Jesse’s disinheritance from Metro. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which insult and (hetero)sexualized spaces shape the rejection and disaffection of characters, who then become more susceptible to vilification. I examine three graphic narratives that demonstrate a literary awareness of the conflation of homosexuality and villainy: My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf, 8-Bit Theater by Brian Clevinger, and My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris. With these three, one may see an illustrated trajectory of homosexualized villainy questioned and ultimately separated. The literary trope of the conflation of homosexuality and villainy is so pervasive it crossed medium boundaries into graphic narratives and video games, yet graphic narratives more apparently embraced the separation of villainy and homosexuality. My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf attempts to absolve homosexual serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer of his homosexuality as an impetus for murder but fails to consider the (heterosexual) societal pressure placed on Dahmer which he then internalizes; 8-Bit Theater by Brian Clevinger portrays an affable homosexual villain thereby complicating the readers’ relationship with villainy and viciousness; and My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris presents homosexual saviors who are monsters but who are not monstruous. These three narratives navigate conceptions of homosexuality and villainy that complicate the traditional trope of conflation. Finally, I consider the ways in which a film can be framed as homosexual by examining marketing, the concept of the auteur, and the intended audience. I examine two paradigms of homosexuality in film: homosexual spaces through the trope of road trips across natural landscapes, and literal villains in 1960s-1990s Disney films. I argue that the trope of road tripping creates a sense of adventure, propelling the plot, through removing homosexual characters from homosexually-friendly urbanscapes and transplanting them onto suburban- and ruralscapes. A byproduct of this trope is that gender performance that does not match a person’s sex is seen as unnatural in more bucolic settings. An examination of Disney villains in late 20th century films demonstrates the ways in which ambitious individuals who overperform or blur their gender identity are quickly and unequivocally villainized in films that simultaneously establish hetero-romantic relationships as normal and desirable for children. This dissertation examines some of many examples of the conflation of villainy and homosexuality in 20th century American media. The conflation makes it difficult for readers to identify homosexual role models. Further areas of study include Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its subsequent graphic novel and television series, as well as Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, and subsequent film. This is a rich subject area that invites further analyzation

Society\u27s View of Mental Illness as a Result of Fictionalized Portrayals of Serial Killer Narratives

Fictionalized serial killer narratives have been essential to media for decades, beginning with the early noir films, detective novels of the 1940s and 50s (Murley, 2), and western narratives which heavily depicted good versus evil (Hall, 5). As media has evolved, fascination with true crime has continued to grow and in turn, began to increasingly provide inspiration for fictional films and TV shows, especially through streaming service television shows like Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019), Mindhunter (2017), and Making a Murder (2015). Through research on the psychological interest in violence, the blurred line between fact and fictional serial killer narratives and their marketability this thesis focuses on the exploitation of mental illness in fictionalized serial killer narratives centering around the depiction of serial killers as monstrous celebrities. It uses Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding theory to explain how incorrect and negative messages about mental health are encoded into filmed media which affects how society views mental illness. These narratives demonize mental illness and this thesis argues that the media has turned the serial killer into a consumable character by exploiting their mental illness. Its goal is to enlighten audiences about how their consumption of fictionalized serial killer narratives, affects the way in which they perceive those living with mental illness

Intersectional Experiences of Violence: Studying the Serial Murder of 16 Men and Boys in Milwaukee, 1987-1991

Between the years of 1987 and 1991, 16 multiply-marginalized men and boys went missing in the City of Milwaukee; few other than their family and friends noticed. In 1991, it was discovered that they were murdered by Jeffrey Dahmer, a white man living on Milwaukee’s near west side. This paper argues that state power, racial capitalism, and white supremacy devalued the lives of Black, queer, young and poor people and created conditions that allowed Dahmer to commit 16 murders without detection by the Milwaukee Police Department. In this thesis, responses from Black, Lao, queer and Othered people are centered. In particular, I emphasize the voices of writers aligned with the Black radical tradition, whose work appears in various archives and offers key perspectives on how racial capitalism and white supremacy operated. This thesis also draws from LGBT and community organization archives to craft an intersectional analysis that demonstrates the dynamics of policing that sanctioned these murders. Policy requests from community members and leaders are then contrasted with municipal responses, which used this tragedy to justify policy changes and increased funding to the Milwaukee Police Department. The implementation of community-oriented policing, while fitting within the requests of some organizers discussed here, did not address the conditions that devalued the lives of the young men who were murdered

An Appetite for Crime: Case Studies of Cannibalism and the Criminological Theories that Explain It

One of the most important aspects of studying crime is identifying how and why certain crimes happen. There are several questions one should ask: Why did this event happen? What caused this to happen? How could it have been stopped? Criminologists use various theories to seek the answer to these questions regarding diverse types of crimes from petty crimes, such as stealing a pack of gum to major, violent crimes, such as cannibalism, the latter of which will be analyzed here. The goal is to prevent these crimes from happening in the future by identifying why they are happening now. In this paper, I hypothesize that the same theory, or theories, can explain the crimes of different cannibals. To test this, I use Jeffery Dahmer, Idi Amin, and Issei Sagawa, three men famous for their acts of cannibalism, as case studies. Various sources, from books to articles to movies, were analyzed to produce brief biographies of each man, discussing events from early childhood into adulthood that could have contributed to their crimes. Then, I use this biographical information and analyze it against three traditional theories: Hirschi’s Social Bond Theory (1969), Agnew’s General Strain Theory (1989), and Aker’s Social Learning Theory (1977). When looking at these three men, it becomes clear that though the number and demographic of their victims differ, the various theories explain all three men’s actions. Similar life events and personality traits contribute to an increased chance of criminogenic behavior, and their motives for murder and cannibalism prove to root in similar places

The Racialization of Sexuality: The Queer Case of Jeffrey Dahmer

In this article I read media and subcultural representations of Jeffrey Dahmer, the white male U.S. serial killer who gained notoriety in the late 1980s for having sex with and then murdering and dismembering men of color in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My aim is to show the extent to which the degree of Dahmer\u27s homosexualization in a particular representation determines Dahmer\u27 s thinking and actions in the sphere of race, and to suggest how spiraling efforts to separate race from sexuality in the Dahmer case only further intricate the two analytic axes.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/english_books/1018/thumbnail.jp

He Speaks Not, Yet He Says Everything; What of That?: Text, Context, and Pretext in State v. Jeffrey Dahmer

In State v. Dahmer, the defense attempted to lead the jury through a series of inferences to conclude that the defendant was insane at the time he committed each of the fifteen murders charged; it portrayed a client who was fully cooperative and honest once the authorities arrested him. To make this approach work, the defense needed narrative distance between the defendant and the jury so he could not be cross examined about his meticulous planning of each murder or his prior inconsistent statements. This paper briefly lays out the development of the defense of insanity, focusing on the different professional aims of law and psychiatry. It then fleshes out how this tension emerged during the Dahmer trial and analyzes how the attorneys attempted to exploit it in terms of Paul Ricoeur\u27s narrative theory. It concludes that the defense was ultimately unsuccessful because it failed to give the jury an adequate context for understanding a life both as ordinary and complex as Dahmer\u27s

He Speaks Not, Yet He Says Everything; What of That?: Text, Context, and Pretext in State v. Jeffrey Dahmer

In State v. Dahmer, the defense attempted to lead the jury through a series of inferences to conclude that the defendant was insane at the time he committed each of the fifteen murders charged; it portrayed a client who was fully cooperative and honest once the authorities arrested him. To make this approach work, the defense needed narrative distance between the defendant and the jury so he could not be cross examined about his meticulous planning of each murder or his prior inconsistent statements. This paper briefly lays out the development of the defense of insanity, focusing on the different professional aims of law and psychiatry. It then fleshes out how this tension emerged during the Dahmer trial and analyzes how the attorneys attempted to exploit it in terms of Paul Ricoeur\u27s narrative theory. It concludes that the defense was ultimately unsuccessful because it failed to give the jury an adequate context for understanding a life both as ordinary and complex as Dahmer\u27s

Montana Kaimin, October 13, 2022

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/studentnewspaper/11098/thumbnail.jp