Blue Rage: A Critical Cultural Analysis of Policing, Whiteness, and Racial Surveillance

This dissertation is an interpretive project deploying critical media analysis and interpretive qualitative methods to examine televisual and cinematic performances of policing. I use interpretive qualitative inquiry to explore blue rage, policing, and whiteness. By highlighting the racial surveillance which undergirds policing, I analyze blue rage as a critical race concept that addresses the affective policing of racial resentment and racial solidarity among law enforcement. My media analyses demonstrate the ways that whiteness is operationalized through law and order and criminal justice. Analyzing cinematic and televisual depictions of the police and racist surveillance, I address policing—as a profession, as a (governing) practice, and as a popular representation. This project attends to the ways that white supremacist violence undergirds practices and media artifacts in everyday life. In defining blue rage, I offer a lens through which scholars can better understand issues of police violence as embedded in representation and not simply existing in literal police encounters