124183 VK BEd 08b.3: VK Cultural Studies and Language Education (2023S)

The TV series Columbo-in syndication between 1968 and 2003-was a TV success story. It not only turned the ‘who-did-it’ concept on its head but confronted audiences with a rather unique male hero. Lt. Columbo was calm, soft-spoken, laid back, afraid of heights but most of all smart and perceptive, instead of displaying a more normatively masculine demeanor: aggression, a willingness to do violence, and brandishing guns and chasing criminal suspects down the streets of L.A. He presented a sharp contrast to other TV-detectives populating the American TV landscape at the time: from hard-boiled detectives like Mike Hammer to tough cops like Lt. Mike Stone in the TV series The Streets of San Francisco.

This course attempts a reading of the TV series in connection with masculinity studies as well as TV and media studies. If the performative act of gender is, as Judith Butler clarifies, “a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint”(Butler, 2004:1); then what are the improvisations Lt. Columbo-whose first name the series never discloses-is enacting? And how may looking at (detective) masculinities from all angles turn into a topic of interest for the English-language classroom?

Students will use critical theory tools taken from gender studies, TV studies and post- structural theory to discuss questions like:
• What are ideas about masculinities that inform the TV show and especially its male protagonist?
• If hegemonic masculinity“is naturalized in the form of the hero and presented through forms that revolve around heroes”(Donaldson, 1996:646) of which detective fiction surely is one, then how does the character of Lt. Columbo ‘re-arrange’ what it means to embody hegemonic manhood?