PLENARY
“The Men Came Looking for Girls”: Sex Trafficking in Contemporary Crime Fiction and the Politics of Representation
Dr Charlotte Beyer, SFHEA, is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at University of Gloucestershire, UK. She has published widely on crime fiction, feminism, and contemporary literature. She is the author of Murder in a Few Words: Gender, Genre and Location in the Crime Short Story (McFarland, 2020). Her edited book Teaching Crime Fiction (Palgrave, 2018) was shortlisted for the 2019 Teaching Literature Book Award. Charlotte’s most recent book is Contemporary Crime Fiction: Crossing Boundaries, Merging Genres (ed., Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021). Her book Mothers Who Kill (Demeter Press, co-edited with Josephine Savarese) is forthcoming in 2022.
PLENARY
Necropornography and Femicide in Spanish-Language Crime Fiction
Dr Glen Close is a Professor of Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States. He is the author of Female Corpses in Crime Fiction. A Transatlantic Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction. A Transatlantic Discourse on Urban Violence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and La imprenta enterrada. Arlt, Baroja y el imaginario anarquista (Beatriz Viterbo, 2000). He is also a co-editor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Detective Fiction: Essays on the Género Negro Tradition (McFarland, 2006) and the translator of Josefina Ludmer’s The Corpus Delicti. A Manual of Argentine Fictions (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).
INTERVIEW
Declan Hughes is a novelist, playwright and screenwriter. He has been Writer-in-Association with the Abbey Theatre. He has written a series of crime novels featuring the Irish-American detective Ed Loy. The name "Loy" is a homage to the character Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon. Some of his novels include All the Things You Are (2014), which follows City of Lost Girls (2010), All the Dead Voices (2009),The Price of Blood (2008), The Dying Breed, The Color of Blood (2007) and The Wrong Kind of Blood (2006).
Day 1 = Friday 21 January 2022
Event 1
13:30 – 14:00 Welcome
Event 2
14:00 – 15:00 Interview: Declan Hughes
with Eoin McCarney, Dublin City University, Ireland
Break 1/15:00 – 15:30
Event 3
16:00 – 17:00 Session 1
Chair: Dr Sarah Meehan O'Callaghan, Independent Researcher, Ireland
Open Discussion
Event 4
17:00 – 18:00 Plenary 1
Necropornography and Femicide in Spanish-Language Crime Fiction
Professor Glen Close, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States of America
Chair: Dr Alicia Castillo Villanueva, Dublin City University, Ireland
Day 2 = Saturday 22 January 2022
Event 5
11:00 – 11:30 Welcome
Event 6
11:30 – 13:00 Session 2
Chair: Dr Olga Springer, Dublin City University, Ireland
Gender and Identity in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger
Dr Fadl Algalhadi, SRTM University, India
Detective Agency: The Active Female Body in Domestic Noir Fiction
Dr Eva Burke, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
The Female Outsider in Northern Irish Crime Fiction
Sharon Dempsey, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland
Lunch /13:00 – 15:00
Event 7
15:00 – 16:30 Session 3
Chair: Jean-Philippe Imbert, Dublin City University, Ireland
Pleasure in Danger: Sex, Drugs and Murder
Dr Alex Dymock, Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom
The Difference Between Playing Dead and Being Dead: Rethinking Victimhood and Harm in Canadian Obscenity
Meg Lonergan, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Event 8
16:30 – 17:30 Plenary 2
Doctor Charlotte Beyer, University of Gloucestershire, United Kingdom
Chair: Eoin McCarney, Dublin City University, Ireland
Gender and Identity in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger
Dr Fadl Algalhadi, SRTM University, India
Day 2│ Saturday 22 January 2022│11:30 – 13:00│Session 2
Gender plays a clinical role in the life and an individual. It is the same gender which decides the social roles. Biology is instrumental in creating male or female but socio-cultural factors are also equally significant to designate an individual lies status in life as well as in society. There appears marital discord between Jimmy and Alison in Osborne's Look Back in Anger. The reason behind it is largely the gender based issues. In case of Jimmy- Alison relationship, all these factors play significant role to create a discord between them. Though they are married to each other, they observe a deep valley in their relationship. There is lack cordially in their relations. Coming from an aristocratic society, Alison is prejudiced about Jimmy & his background. Likewise, Jimmy hails from lower middle strata of society. He has all negative feelings regarding Alison and her family. Jimmy regards all women of the world like Alison, good for nothing. Similarly, Alison thinks of Jimmy. To conclude, the disregard between them for the other creates problems which further begin in the issues related with gender and individual identity.
Fadl Mohammed Aied Algalhadi holds a Ph.D. in English Literature (a comparative study) from Swami Ramanand Teerth Marathwada University, Nanded, Maharashtra State, India in August 2019. At Thamar University faculty of Education he studied Bachelor in English in the period 2002 to June 2006; He gradually becomes technical administrator at Thamar University from 2006 to 2010. Throughout his career Fadl taught English courses of English at Secondary School for three years at Alshamahi School. Afterwards he is a distinguished graduate Master from Swami Ramanand Teerth Marathwada Arts School. Algalhadi has been an invited as Guest Lecturer at Arts, Commerce & Science College, Basmathnagar, Dist. Hingoli, Nanded, India April 2015. Mr. Fadl Algalhadi has presented and published a number of papers in national and international conferences.
Detective Agency: The Active Female Body in Domestic Noir Fiction
Dr Eva Burke, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Day 2│ Saturday 22 January 2022│11:30 – 13:00│Session 2
One of the most prominent and ongoing debates with regard to noir fiction and crime fiction more broadly is the question surrounding the representation of violence against female-gendered bodies. In 2018, the Staunch Prize was launched: an international literary award for a work of crime fiction in which “no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered”. Ostensibly a response to the proliferation of damaged and destroyed female bodies in crime fiction, the prize provoked outrage within the writing community, with author Val McDermid asserting that “as long as men commit appalling acts of misogyny and violence against women, I will write about it so that it does not go unnoticed”. This paper argues that the rise of domestic noir fiction, focused as it is on the inner lives and investigative agency of female characters, foregrounds the ways in which women are victimised without making a spectacle of their destruction. Writers like Gillian Flynn, Liane Moriarty, and Megan Abbott have worked to challenge the prevalence of violated and deconstructed female bodies within the genre through depictions of women who actively engage with their own vulnerability. Thus, there is a reconfiguration of the power dynamics underlying the perpetually reoccurring spectre of the destroyed female body in the crime novel. These writers engage in what Delys Bird and Brenda Walker describe as a ‘confrontation’ with the maleness of the genre: ‘women writers of crime fiction, then, working in a male preserve with a genre always considered definitively masculine despite its numerous very well-known female practitioners, might now use the genre in a way that challenged and confronted its maleness. Women readers too could identify with those challenges’. This paper will explore that 'confrontation' and ask whether the domestic noir subgenre signifies a permanent shift in terms of representations of victimised women.
Dr Eva Burke has recently completed a PhD, funded by the Irish Research Council, at the school of English at Trinity College Dublin under the supervision of Dr. Clare Clarke. Her PhD research looks at domestic noir fiction, specifically the work of Gillian Flynn. Eva has previously published work in the Journal of International Women's Studies, Feminist Spaces, Trinity Postgraduate Review, and the 2018 edited collection From the Domestic to the Dominant: The New Face of Crime Fiction, published by Palgrave Macmillan. She co-edited the latest issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection with Dr. Clarke, and is in talks to publish her doctoral research as a monograph. Her research interests include representations of female experience within crime fiction, true crime narratives, horror and detective fiction.
The Female Outsider in Northern Irish Crime Fiction
Sharon Dempsey, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland
Day 2│ Saturday 22 January 2022│11:30 – 13:00│Session 2
In reading crime fiction through the lens of the female victim, we can examine the trauma of past and present real violence against women. Referencing Gill Plain’s statement, ‘Murder is written on the body and bodies are never neutral,’ the object of the CF narrative is one of detection and resolution, so when the institutions that are charged with delivering this resolution (justice as decided by police and the legal system) are overwhelmingly masculine, white and heteronormative, this has profound repercussions for female characters. In a narrative about sexual violence the female body becomes the crime scene and is subjected to the double assault of forensic investigation. The justice system has been proven to favour the interests of men and often the female victim is asked to present herself as pure, innocent and without fault. (2019) As part of practice-led PhD I am writing a domestic noir novel, After the Party, exploring the ramifications of rape, and how an act of sexual violence, rather than a murder, can cause repercussions within the paradigm of class, gender and sectarianism. I interrogate the theme of middle-class privilege, through a group of middle-aged friends, who find their comfortable lives torn apart, when their sons are accused of the rape. I ask how far they will go to protect their sons. My paper will explore my work in progress and provide a critical exploration of the female victim in crime fiction.
Sharon Dempsey is a Belfast based crime writer. The first in her new crime series, Who Took Eden Mulligan? was published in 2021, by Avon Harper Collins. The second in the series, The Midnight Killing, will be out in Spring 2022. She is undertaking a creative-critical PhD at Queen’s University, exploring class and gender in Northern Irish crime fiction and has published four novels and three non-fiction books.
Pleasure in Danger: Sex, Drugs and Murder
Dr Alex Dymock, Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom
Day 2│ Saturday 22 January 2022│15:00 – 16:30│Session 3
This paper will discuss the impact media depictions of sex, drugs and murder on the slow criminalisation of chemsex. In November 2016, Stefano Brizzi was convicted of murdering a police officer after ‘luring him to his flat for sex and drugs’ via Grindr. The case had a host of potent ingredients ripe for true crime media depictions: alleged cannibalism, supposed imitations of a scene from the TV series Breaking Bad (when Brizzi attempted to dissolve the body of the victim in acid) and alleged Satanism. Despite the case only retaining a vague connection to the so-called ‘unholy’ trinity of drugs associated with chemsex - Brizzi’s use of methamphetamine - the jury were provided for context with graphic details about the ’seedy and dangerous’ world of chemsex, where gay men use smart phone apps to meet complete strangers for hastily arranged drug-fuelled orgies and were even shown a snippet from the Vice documentary, Chemsex (2015), by way of illustration. In the same month, Stephen Port – who became known as the ‘chemsex murderer’ across multiple newspapers – was convicted of the murder of 4 men, and 6 counts of administering a poison with intent, alongside numerous counts for sexual offences. In all cases, he overdosed his victims with the drug GHB, again after ‘luring’ them to his flat via Grindr. While previously the majority of media and public discourse on chemsex had been concerned with issues of public health, particularly its possible connection with rise in HIV diagnoses in gay and bisexual men, these two cases and the publicity they received led to a push for new policing strategy around chemsex, despite extremely limited links between these cases and chemsex practices. The Home Office drugs strategy in 2017, for instance, named chemsex a ‘major new areas of concern’, and that they already had plans to infiltrate apps such as Grindr to try and identify those likely to engage in it. Thus, while chemsex was initially conceived as a ‘public health crisis’ it seems likely that as a result of the media depictions of chemsex and its unevidenced relationship with the two murder cases above, it may be subject to increased police surveillance of gay and bisexual men’s sexual practices, and targeted criminalization by the backdoor.
Dr Alex Dymock is a Lecturer in Law at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is primarily known for her work in the areas of sexuality and criminal law, pornography and visual criminology, and most research on sex on drugs. She has published widely in these areas, including articles in Theoretical Criminology, International Journal of Drug Policy, Sexualities, and Legal Studies.
The Difference Between Playing Dead and Being Dead: Rethinking Victimhood and Harm in Canadian Obscenity
Meg Lonergan, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Day 2│ Saturday 22 January 2022│15:00 – 16:30│Session 3
There are few universal truths, but one I would like to propose is the fundamental difference between playing and being dead. While I trained as a criminologist, not as a philosopher, I suggest that the state of being alive or dead is a critical and, at least for the most part, easily discerned distinction. However, Canadian obscenity law makes no such distinction—a fictional representation of sexual violence is treated the same as an authentic recording of actual sexual violence or even murder—for the purposes of obscene materials related offenses. The continued existence of criminal obscenity offenses in Canada was solidified in the 1992 Supreme Court of Canada ruling in R. v. Butler, wherein the Court stated that the criminalization of obscene materials was constitution because it is intended to address harm rather than morality. Nearly 30 years later, available research on media-effects and linkages between depictions of fictional content and acting out behaviors in the real-world remain tenuous. But even if media-effects theories are correct, should Canadian law treat representations of acts the same as recordings of those acts? In this paper I propose that it is past time the Canadian legal system repeal s. 163 obscene materials offenses and acknowledge the very real difference between playing and being dead.
Meg D. Lonergan is a Ph.D. candidate in Legal Studies with a collaborative specialization in Political Economy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She currently teaches as a contract instructor in Legal Studies at Carleton, as well as in Sociology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her research interests span cultural criminology, feminist theory, sex and technology, horror and porn studies, and research ethics.