| Summary: | This dissertation is an investigation of the gendering of the crime fiction genre in Spain with a particular emphasis on the modes of representation of the female body and perspective. The present analysis provides insight into how certain authors, through their manipulation of this generic convention, engage readers on the politics of visibility of the female body. While most scholars situate the genre's feminization in the 1970s, I demonstrate that this gendering has created an alternative tradition as we already see in the first models of women delinquents in Pedro Antonio de Alarcon's El clavo (1853), Benito Perez Galdos' El crimen de la calle de Fuencarral (1888-1889), and Emilia Pardo Bazan's La gota de sangre (1911). With these early examples signaling the emergence of a protofeminist counterdiscourse, the feminization of the genre continues with the first female detective to spring forth in Federico Mediante's La senorita detective (1944) through to the first modern hard-boiled sleuth in Lourdes Ortiz's Picadura mortal (1979). Studying how the gazing mechanisms work in these narratives, I demonstrate how these female characters utilize the male look against itself. In contrast with the representations of women's bodies in mainstream crime fiction that are a source of narrative pleasure, Maria-Antonia Oliver's Lonia Guiu series, where for the first time there is an exploration of the female body as a victimized body, signifies a radical shift in the genre's politics of visibility as the female body becomes the site for a discussion of gender violence and for redefining victimhood and justice. By understanding the contemporary female detective novel through the lens of an already gendered genre, we can see that the feminized form of justice at work in female crime fiction has its roots in the first female delinquents, who denounce a social, moral, and legal system that is unfair in its position towards women.
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