Chapter 5 - LGBTQ+ Representation: Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Nekesa Afia’s Dead Dead Girls, Michael Nava’s Lies With Man, and Stella Duffy’s Fresh Flesh

Summary

This chapter examines the intersections between #MeToo, crime fiction, and LGBTQ+ themes. LGBTQ+ representation is a key issue in crime fiction in the age of #MeToo. However, as Jess Ison and others state, queer communities have been marginalized from the #MeToo debates which have focused on cis gender white women. As Tarana Burke points out, “[w]omen of color, transwomen, queer people—our stories get pushed aside,” whereas the #MeToo movement must be for all genders and colors, and gender and sexuality outside white cis heteronormativity must receive more attention. The #MeToo movement is working to rectify this, by thinking intersectionally and inclusively—what Guadalupe-Diaz and Whalley call “queering #MeToo.” My book argues that LGBTQ+ perspectives are central to the #MeToo movement and fourth-wave feminism, and that these perspectives are bringing crucial innovations to crime fiction in the form of positive and more complex representation. The final two chapters of this book investigate LGBTQ+ representation in the genre, specifically in relation to #MeToo themes. Contemporary crime fiction examines how LGBTQ+ people are the victims of sexual crime or homophobic or transphobic crime, using plots and characters to portray and expose these forms of crime. Furthermore, in contemporary crime fiction, LGBTQ+ people are crucial to solving crime and achieving justice for victims. They are often portrayed as victims of crime often specifically related to their identity, but importantly they are also the solvers of crime. I begin by analyzing a canonical crime novel, namely Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939), focusing on the novel's male-identification and representations of homophobia, in order to illustrate persistent stereotypes in the genre. Moving on to contemporary crime fiction, I investigate Nekesa Afia's Dead Dead Girls (2021), Michael Nava, Lies With Man (2021), and Stella Duffy, Fresh Flesh (1999). Through the contrast highlighted between canonical texts and their representation of sexuality and contemporary LGBTQ+ themed and authored crime fiction, the influence of fourth-wave feminism and the #MeToo movement can clearly be seen both thematically and stylistically. I do not define LGBTQ+ as a genre, but rather as a range of thematic concerns and preoccupations which are personally and politically informed and which impact on crime fiction representation. To clarify that in terms of my position in relation to this material, I am writing as a white cis woman and an LGBTQ+ ally.