(Un)Safe Spaces: Spatial Disruption and Female Identity in the Contemporary French Crime Genre
Lead Research Organisation:
Queen's University Belfast
Department Name: Sch of Arts, English and Languages
Abstract
From novels to podcasts to film, the crime genre remains an enduringly fascinating area of popular culture, where the complexities of morality and justice can be interrogated and nuanced. In recent years, gender has become a central element of popular crime novels and films, which increasingly feature female detectives, female perpetrators, and hybrids of the two. However, there remains a dearth of analysis on the representation of such characters in the contemporary French crime genre, and in particular on how that representation affects - or is affected by - some of the its classic structural and cultural elements.
One of the most significant of these elements is the centrality of space and place to crime fiction of any kind. This project intends to investigate the intersection between gender and space in the crime genre, drawing from a primarily literary, female-centred corpus but with regard also to notable film adaptations or celebrated, long-running TV series - all of which feature female protagonists. Leaning on the work of Bachelard (1958) and Blanc (1991), we will examine how the movement of female detectives and perpetrators - already disruptive by the fact of their gender and agency - through spaces typically designated as 'safe' or 'unsafe' for them within the world of crime culture may unsettle the foundations of the genre itself. Ultimately, this research seeks to discover what relationship there may be between this spatial disruption in what we may call the female-centred crime text, and the disruptive function of the crime text itself; between its representation of female agency, and the genre's function as mirror of society's most fearful imaginings.
Our research will begin by mapping out the specific functions fulfilled in the crime genre by our chosen character types, foregrounding the gendered aspect of their representation by focusing on how they portray female agency and identity. This part of the research will be threefold; we will begin with female detectives, exploring how such characters destabilise, distort or parody gendered paradigms (e.g. by using the historically denigrated 'feminine intuition' to succeed in a role traditionally awarded to male characters). We will then pass to female perpetrators, whose changing representation in the works of our corpus - which spans five decades - encourages re-examination of the long-held assumptions encoded in the crime genre about female aversion to violence, or about women's criminal motivations. Finally, we will examine victim-perpetrators: those women who occupy a transitional role between our two previous characters, and who challenge traditional expectations about the motivations, actions and fates of female characters in the crime genre.
Having evaluated the unsettling nature of these characters, we will examine how that nature is expressed by their gendered exercise of agency, in such symbolically charged spaces as the city street and the bedroom, the holding cell and the courthouse. We argue that this spatial disruption is both integral to the function of crime texts - designed to unsettle harmonious visions of society - and intimately tied to the composition of the female-centred crime text. We may conclude this research by suggesting that contemporary crime texts which centre female characters are innovative in their gendered disruption of space - and, in turn, encourage more nuanced thinking about female agency and identity in the wider world of crime culture, both fictitious and real.
One of the most significant of these elements is the centrality of space and place to crime fiction of any kind. This project intends to investigate the intersection between gender and space in the crime genre, drawing from a primarily literary, female-centred corpus but with regard also to notable film adaptations or celebrated, long-running TV series - all of which feature female protagonists. Leaning on the work of Bachelard (1958) and Blanc (1991), we will examine how the movement of female detectives and perpetrators - already disruptive by the fact of their gender and agency - through spaces typically designated as 'safe' or 'unsafe' for them within the world of crime culture may unsettle the foundations of the genre itself. Ultimately, this research seeks to discover what relationship there may be between this spatial disruption in what we may call the female-centred crime text, and the disruptive function of the crime text itself; between its representation of female agency, and the genre's function as mirror of society's most fearful imaginings.
Our research will begin by mapping out the specific functions fulfilled in the crime genre by our chosen character types, foregrounding the gendered aspect of their representation by focusing on how they portray female agency and identity. This part of the research will be threefold; we will begin with female detectives, exploring how such characters destabilise, distort or parody gendered paradigms (e.g. by using the historically denigrated 'feminine intuition' to succeed in a role traditionally awarded to male characters). We will then pass to female perpetrators, whose changing representation in the works of our corpus - which spans five decades - encourages re-examination of the long-held assumptions encoded in the crime genre about female aversion to violence, or about women's criminal motivations. Finally, we will examine victim-perpetrators: those women who occupy a transitional role between our two previous characters, and who challenge traditional expectations about the motivations, actions and fates of female characters in the crime genre.
Having evaluated the unsettling nature of these characters, we will examine how that nature is expressed by their gendered exercise of agency, in such symbolically charged spaces as the city street and the bedroom, the holding cell and the courthouse. We argue that this spatial disruption is both integral to the function of crime texts - designed to unsettle harmonious visions of society - and intimately tied to the composition of the female-centred crime text. We may conclude this research by suggesting that contemporary crime texts which centre female characters are innovative in their gendered disruption of space - and, in turn, encourage more nuanced thinking about female agency and identity in the wider world of crime culture, both fictitious and real.
