Landscapes of violence, galleries of crime : gender violence in selected post-apartheid crime novels written by women

Abstract

This thesis aims to interrogate the ways in which gender violence is portrayed in selected crime novels written by South African women writers. This thesis contends that the fictional texts written by South African female writers a vista into how female characters disrupt the discourses that continue to treat them as victims of gender violence. This thesis explores how South African women writers’ engage genre fiction to create a space to converse or dialogue on gender violence that has turned into a war mostly waged against and on the female body. What makes this study new is bringing together of crime novels written by both black and white women to converse on the unspeakable subject of gender violence which traverses markers of difference such as race, class or sexual orientation. In each chapter, both black and white female writers are made to engage with a specific response to gender violence (notwithstanding that two texts covered in this study were written by one black female writer). Gender violence is presented as an undercurrent that runs through the entre thesis, hence the need to break it down into different themes that constitute each chapter. In order to streamline the debate, each given chapter creates a space where two texts enter into a dialogue about the envisioned responses to gender violence. In this regard, the study shows that identities of the female characters in the selected texts are complex. Despite being considered victims of gender violence, these women neither share and experience violence in the same way nor do they react to this violence in a similar manner.

This study thus study demonstrates how the selected texts complicate the overarching theory of gender performativity. Chapter 2 focuses on Margie Orford’s Like Clockwork and Makholwa’s Red Ink by interrogating how the female bodies disrupt the narratives that are written on them by male perpetrators of violence. The female characters use their vulnerability as a mechanism to move beyond their victimhood status. The study contests the disparities that have been and continue to be etched on the female bodies by illustrating how the living and dead bodies of women break the silence that contributes to female victimhood. Chapter 3 analyses the female coping mechanisms in Jassy Mackenzie’s Random Violence and Angela Makholwa’s Black Widow Society. The discussion centres on individual and collective female coping strategies that are evident in the notion of female killers. This chapter problematises the notion of collective female strategy by demonstrating that, though the female characters’ actions towards gender violence are collectively implemented, their lived experiences still remain different. Chapter 4 interrogates the notion of gender power relations as represented in Sarah Lotz’s Exhibit A and Hawa Jande Golakai’s The Lazarus Effect. The interrogation delves into how the uneven gender power relations are responsible for gender violence that is perpetrated against women. This chapter reveals that men mostly use power to suppress women’s voices so that they remain unheard, particularly, through the crimes of rape and murder. Chapter 5 is the conclusion of the thesis which provides a reflection on gender violence as well as further extending the theoretical framework on gender. This chapter highlights that crime fiction challenges the gender binaries that are implicated in the chapters of this study.