Abstract
Focusing on Maxine Peake’s performances as a television actor, as real-life murderer Myra Hindley in Neil McKay’s See No Evil (2006) and fictional detective Helen Marshall in 2009’s TV film adaptations of David Peace’s Red Riding novels, this chapter examines ‘Northern’ working-class femininity in the context of an imagined North that is positioned as uniformly working-class and in a quasi-post-colonial set of power relations with a normatively central South, and the ways in which these performances intersect with Peake’s public persona and her musical collaboration with the Eccentronic Research Council to both use and challenge Gothically inflected images of the North.
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Notes
- 1.
Hereafter Underture.
- 2.
The film is hereafter referred to as 1980 and the series as Red Riding.
- 3.
This term derives from David Forrest and Beth Johnson’s concept. See Forrest, D and Johnson, B’s Special-issue dossier on ‘Northern Stardom’ (2016) for the Journal of Popular Television, also featuring Gorton, K and Peirse A ‘A Revolutionary Voice’: Analysing Maxine Peake’s Northern Stardom in Silk and Room at the Top’.
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Phillips, H. (2017). ‘A Woman Like That Is Not A Woman, Quite. I Have Been Her Kind’: Maxine Peake and the Gothic Excess of Northern Femininity. In: Forrest, D., Johnson, B. (eds) Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55506-9_11
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