Chapter 2 - #MeToo: Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair, Lauren Henderson’s “#MeToo,” Susan White’s Cut, and Jennifer Haigh’s Mercy Street

Summary

Chapter 2 investigates crime fiction's engagement with #MeToo, taking a broader approach that focuses on the genre's representations of women's oppression and how patriarchy uses women's sexualities and bodies against them to victimize them. I place this analysis within the context of fourth-wave feminism and the #MeToo movement. Phil Hubbard argues that #MeToo has provided fresh momentum for the feminist movement, but also stresses that #MeToo is part of an ongoing feminist struggle “against misogyny and patriarchal violence” for women and “socially marginalised groups.” In this chapter, I analyze representations of major #MeToo themes, such as sexual violence against women, gender discrimination, sexual harassment against women in the workplace, and reproductive justice. These topics reflect ongoing feminist preoccupations since the second wave of feminism; however, the contemporary crime texts examined here demonstrate that the feminist struggle against sexual violence, gender discrimination, and reproductive rights must be fought with renewed vigor in the face of conservative political and cultural forces which seek to row back on equality for women and other socially marginalized groups and that crime fiction plays an active part in that. This chapter shows how crime texts that problematize male violence and misogyny contribute importantly to “call-out culture” by explicitly linking these topics to crime and the search for justice. Ann J. Cahill comments on the politics of representation and objectification, stating that:

Much of feminist theory has been committed to the claim that the sexual objectification of women is harmful, degrading, and oppressive. To be viewed as a sex object is to be regarded as less than a full human person, to be debased and reduced to mere flesh. The male gaze—which is male primarily in its effect, not necessarily in its origin, in that women can also adopt it—defines and constrains women, assesses their beauty, and in doing so dehumanizes them.

This chapter focuses on crime texts which expose misogynistic cultural narratives and crimes originating in white male supremacy which are key to fourth-wave feminism and the #MeToo movement. These crime texts demonstrate how crime fiction can interrogate these narratives and crimes, creating greater awareness among readers and audiences of patriarchy's insidious and explicit harm instead of perpetuating it. Traditionally, crime fiction has tended to focus less on the victims of crime and their traumas and more on the detectives and their crime-solving skills.