Female Victims and Aggressors. Representations of Violence in Crime Fiction Written by Women (VANACEM)
The project, which draws on the line of study of its predecessor "Mujeres y novela criminal en España (1975-2010): autoras, figuras de poder, víctimas y criminals. (MUNCE)" aims at completing the process of making crime fiction written by women visible, which we started through the website www.ub.edu/munce (that is why we retain the same logotype) and, above all, at using this corpus of texts to analyse how violence against women, but also of women's violence, is portrayed, issue which is gaining importance in feminist and gender studies, especially within the legal and philosophical spheres. We want to apply certain concepts belonging to the fields of critical criminology, feminist criminology or victimology to the literary analysis. We believe that this kind of study might be of interest not only from the perspective of the literary analysis, but also to complement the exploration of similar issues, developed, for example, in the sociological field –for crime fiction, through its characters and plots, always proves to reflect on social topics and current circumstances.
Objectives
- Development, by all the members of the research team, of a conceptual network belonging to the criminology field (critical criminology, feminist criminology) and to the field of victimology, which can be applied to the literary analysis of the representations of violence in crime fiction written by women.
- Analysis of the paratexts of the corpus: iconic analysis of the covers, study of the back covers, flaps, band and other elements supplementary to the text that bear ideology.
- Analysis of the corpus of crime fiction written by women from a gendered perspective: stereotypes in the creation of characters and situations, body language of the characters, etc.
- Emphasis on the translation section of this corpus in order to facilitate subsequent studies of translation and reception; for example the case of Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s reception in Italy.
- Execution of activities allowing the social transference of knowledge: courses, symposiums, seminars and workshops open to the public within academic fields, libraries and cultural centres.
Photo: Jan Jurstrand, Lectora 21