Rewriting genre/gender? Crime fiction by women authors from India and Latin America

Abstract

Crime fiction written by women and featuring women private investigators or police personnel has attracted much academic attention in recent times revealing increasing self-referentiality to issues of genre and gender. Critics and researchers are sharply divided over the suitability of the detective genre for questioning or transgressing existing social models between those who argue that a feminist detective novel is an oxymoron and those who contend that the feminization of the genre has revitalized it through ironic and parodic adaptations. At the same time, many of these novels could be seen to posit questions of gender, identity, race and class in new ways. This article seeks to critically explore these issues from within a comparative perspective in the works of some women authors from the Hispanic world as well as from India to look at the commonalities in the dynamics of genre/gender construction. The writers and texts I juxtapose and read for the purpose of my analysis are Claudia Piñeiro's Betibú (2010), Marcela Serrano's Nuestra señora de la soledad (1999) and C.K. Meena's Dreams for the Dying (2008). I would like to argue that these novels push the boundaries of the genre by denying the possibility of closure and neat endings, thus creating a counter discourse of crime fiction and in the process raise questions related to identity and gender in the present day world.