Detecting resistance/resisting detection: The (re)codification of sexuality and gender in 19th and 20th century Anglo-American detective fiction.

摘要

Despite the wide range of attention the subject of sensationalism attracts in current academic discourse, little has been done to theorize the role of the articulation of sexual and criminal "scandal"in terms of power and resistance, or to expose the link between sensationalism and mystery fictions. The "sensational"is most often treated as an isolated phenomenon, separable either by mode of articulation or context, and thus the negotiation of power and resistance operating within what I refer to as the "scandal dynamic"is often obscured or negated by the imposition of binary structures, or simply ignored as it operates in the space between such binarisms. The lack here is composed of exclusionary critical tactics, which fail to fully account for the tensions that constitute the space(s) of articulated resistance and the negotiation of power. What is needed in current critical discourse concerning sensationalism and identity construction is a new way of seeing and articulating the resistance(s), which such articulations convey.;This project develops a theoretical approach to rhetorical expressions of resistance, which can be applied to virtually any verbal, written, or visual "text." Informed by the theories of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault and Bourdieu, I focus primarily on the sometimes subtle negotiations of, sometimes violent reactions against the pervasive patterns of subject codification in terms of gender and sexuality as represented in the works of several mystery, detective, and crime novelists such as; Wilkie Collins, Doyle, Emile Gaboriau, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and the "Golden Age" mystery writers, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. I then negotiate the feminist vs. anti-feminist debate currently surrounding two contemporary female detective novelists, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, and explore what I and others see as perhaps the space that most radically reconstructs available gender and sex roles, lesbian detective fictions.