nÚmero especial sobre la novela criminal femenina || introduction

IntroductionAuthor(s): Shelley GodslandSource: Letras Femeninas, Vol. 28, No. 1, NÚMERO ESPECIAL SOBRE LA NOVELA CRIMINALFEMENINA (VERANO 2002), pp. 11-15Published by: Asociacion Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina HispanicaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23021381 .

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Introduction

Women and crime—a combination sure to elicit extreme responses: the outrage and moral high tones of self-proclaimed guardians of 'values'

and 'standards' in cases protagonized by female criminals, particularly those who perpetrate murder or abandon their children; the renewal of

fear among women for whom news of yet another female victim brings the realization that many public and domestic spaces are not safe for

them; or the heightened awareness for women of the implications of the

culpability assigned to the victim of gendered criminal violence. This

juncture between the sex of an offender or victim and the disobedience

of the law, the meting out of legally-sanctioned or popularly-imposed

punishment, and the uncovering of gendered criminality often also

function to excite extensive media interest, and are constants of multiple

sub-genres of crime and detective fiction. Media and narrative

representation of these relationships, however, is frequently managed and

manipulated to proffer patriarchally-engineered portrayals of female

offenders, victims of crime, and investigators which position the female

victim as responsible for her victimization and the female felon as mad,

inherently or biologically bad, and quite definitely dangerous to know

(see Falcon, Meyers, & Perez Abellän). It is precisely these stereotypes that women writers of crime and

detective fiction in the Hispanic world want to challenge in their fictions, often in ways similar to those posited by Anglophone authors in the mold

of Sarah Paretsky and Sue Grafton during approximately the last two

decades. One of the principal aims of this special volume, then, is to

reveal the ways in which women from Spanish-speaking nations—and

from other linguistic groups within them—reconfigure the gendering of

deviance, explore ways of recasting the female victim, examine the

function of the female sleuth in investigating and uncovering the links

between sex and crime, and reformulate some or all of the basic tenets

underpinning the several forms of the crime genre in order to articulate

feminist concerns and to assess women's relationship to crime in national

contexts where gendered and other types of violence are perpetrated by



12 Letras Femeninas, Volumen XXVIII, No. 1 (junio 2002)

official institutions as well as by individual men. Given the scant critical

attention these writers of crime and detective fiction have received—

even in national contexts where the genre is recognized as a major contribution to national letters—another of our objectives is to attempt to overcome this scholarly lacuna.

Although a brief overview of a number of recent important critical

texts devoted to crime fiction in Spanish might suggest that women writers

in any of its sub-genres are few and far between,1 the history of women

writing about crime and detection in the Hispanic world in fact dates

from the seventeenth century when the Toledo nun Isabel de Jesüs included

in her autobiography details of her sleuthing exploits in two contemporary murder cases. As Sherry Velasco points out in her essay, the nun's principal motivation for investigating the homicides that occurred in her

neighborhood was to prove the innocence of women falsely accused of

committing the crimes and who, without her intervention, would have

been subjected to torture and physical abuse in an attempt to extract a

confession of guilt. Criminal victimization of the female is also the topic analyzed in

Nina Molinaro's paper which focuses specifically on attitudes to rape and the portrayal of the female victim and male perpetrator of sexual

violence. Molinaro bases her study on fictions by the two most prominent

female writers of crime fiction in contemporary Spain: Maria-Antõnia

Oliver, who publishes in Catalan, and Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett whose

novels written in Castilian have reached a wide audience and have been

adapted for television. Molinaro argues that the first novel in each authors'

series of crime narratives reveals that rape is a cultural norm rather than

an aberration and that within the context of a patriarchal society structured

to normalize sexual aggression, achieving justice is often an impossibility. Oliver and Gimenez-Bartlett's fictions are the subject of my own

study in which I analyze the move from the articulation of a liberal,

bourgeois feminism in the works of Oliver written during the late 1980s

and early 1990s, to the incorporation of ideologies which can be read as

postfeminist within Gimenez-Bartlett's crime writing published towards

the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. Feminist

classification of Gimenez-Bartlett's works is central to Kathleen

Thompson-Casado's paper, too, and she assesses the contradictions and

ambiguities inherent in the portrayal of Inspector Petra Delicado, a female

member of the male-controlled Spanish police and the first such fictional

figure to protagonize woman-authored crime fiction from Spain. Oliver's



Godsland 13

revision of the hard-boiled novela negra to feminist ends is examined in

Nancy Vosburg's contribution to the volume, and she discusses how the

crime genre can be deployed to verbalize and explore not only women's

relationship to crime as either offender or victim but also wider issues of

female social participation, social marginalization, challenges to the

patriarchal status quo, and the formation of woman-centered social

groupings, themes also explored by Marisa Herrera Postlewate who posits the crime novel as a vehicle and site for female self-exploration and

discovery. Female rewriting and parody of the Spanish novela negra are

examined further in Alison Maginn's essay which analyzes Lourdes Ortiz's

Picadura mortal, the first of the post-Franco woman-authored crime

fictions to feature a female P.I. Although Ortiz's hurriedly-written novel

has not received universal acclaim and has been rejected as a possible feminist text by some critics, Maginn argues convincingly for a re-reading of the work which, she notes, functions to subvert generic conventions

while offering up its female sleuth as a parodic demythification of the

tough male detective of fiction and film. The differences between female

and male investigators, their preoccupations and modus operandi are

central to Gianna Martella's paper, too. Her analysis of fictions by Syria Poletti and Maria Angelica Bosco, two early contributors to the

development of crime fiction in Argentina, focuses on the ways in which

they re-work European and North American tenets of the genre in order

to foreground concern with the increasing national social and political

unrest that characterized the period in which the texts were written, and

with women's responses to crime and violence in their immediate

environment.

A further paper which takes Argentinean texts as the object of its

analysis is that by Anahi Mallol. Focusing on the poetry and prose of

contemporary Argentinean author Maria Moreno, Mallol dissects and

uncovers the narrative and generic strategies deployed by her

countrywoman to articulate the construction of criminality and of the

delinquent in particular. Anahi Mallol explores these narrative and

criminological issues further when she puts them into practice in her

award-winning poem entitled "Red clothes for you or kill me, please, serial killer", a text which also remits to the criminal victimization of the

female addressed by many of the other contributors to the volume. A

second fictional piece, also by an Argentinean writer, is Edda Sartori's

short story "El crimen de Stevenson", a playful, Borgesian parody of the



14 Letras Femeninas, Volumen XXVIII, No. 1 (junio 2002)

crime tale which contains Sartori's hallmark fluidity and doubling of

language and images. It is perhaps significant that with the exception of Mallol's paper, all

critical contributions to this special volume of Letras Femeninas were

submitted by scholars writing in English and working in the United States

or, in my case, Great Britain. This may indicate that, as yet, women's

crime writing is not deemed worthy, or, at least, is not exciting critical

interest to any great degree in the countries that generate this type of

literature. Furthermore, papers focus on narrative from Spain and

Argentina. While there is no doubt that these two countries have witnessed the publication of the most significant numbers of woman-authored crime

fictions, other nations such as Mexico and Chile are experiencing

important increases in female participation in the genre, while Brazil

boasts a large number of successful contributors to a well-established

national tradition in this type of fiction. It is to be hoped, therefore, that

despite current limitations on geographical scope and source of critical

material, this collection will function as a springboard for further debate

about burgeoning female involvement in a genre that remains perennially

popular with readers and, as the essays included here reveal, can function

as an important means of articulating and disseminating issues of concern to a broad-based readership.

Shelley Godsland, Guest Editor

NOTES

1 In Spain the studies by Joan Ramon Resina and Jose Colmeiro are typical examples of this phenomenon, as Resina mentions no female writers of crime

fiction at all and Colmeiro makes reference to only two, neither of whom are at the forefront of the reformulation of this type of literature by women in Spain. A

frequently-cited text which offers an in-depth analysis of Argentinean crime fic tion is Lafforgue and Rivera's Asesinos de papel. Once again, only the briefest mention of women writers is made, despite the visibility of and critical acclaim afforded figures such as Angelica Gorodischer and, during the last century, Silvina

Ocampo, both of whom experimented with the genre. None of the lengthy sec

tions focussing on a single writer features a woman author.



Godsland 15

WORKS CITED

Colmeiro, Jose. La novela policiaca espaiiola: teoria e historia critica.

Barcelona: Anthropos, 1994.

Falcon, Lidia. Violencia contra la mujer. Madrid: Vindicaciõn Feminista, 1991.

LafForgue, Jorge & Jorge B. Rivera. Asesinos depapel. Buenos Aires: Colihue:

1996.

Meyers, Marian. News Coverage of Violence Against Women. Engendering

Blame. Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage, 1997.

PerezAbellän, Francisco. Ellas matan mejor. 50 crimenes cometidospor mujeres.

Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 2000.

Resina, Joan Ramon. El cadaver en la cocina. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1997.



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