Adonis revisited: Erotic representations of the male body in women's crime fiction

Abstract

If we take a close look at representations of the male body in popular culture, John Berger's famous phrase "Men look at women, and women watch themselves being looked at" no longer seems appropriate. Not only in the visual media, but also in popular literature male bodies are presented in increasingly eroticised ways, hence making them available for the female gaze and female desire. This shift, or "disruption of conventional patterns of looking", as Rosalind Gill observes, and the representation of maleness in popular culture and everyday life in general, has attracted much scholarly attention in recent years. While visual media such as films and advertising have already been discussed, in this respect women's crime novels remain to be examined closely. These texts have boomed in the international book market during the past two decades and are characterised, among other aspects, by disrupting conventional patterns. In my paper, I shall argue that eroticised representations of the male body are a striking feature of many women's crime novels, leading to a new type of character, the Adonis, the beautiful, erotic male-often as an homme fatal, a lethally attractive male-and that erotic tension, triggered by these representations, is crucial to the genre's typical form of suspense in some of the most popular examples.