Dialogues with Tradition: Feminist-Queer Encounters in German Crime Stories at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Pieke Biermann’s feminist crime collection Mit Zorn, Charme, und Methode (1992) and Lisa Kuppler’s gay and lesbian anthology Queer Crime (2002) engage in a common project, the rewriting of a popular genre to give voice to previously marginalized identities and perspectives. This article investigates the ways in which each volume negotiates the gendered conventions of crime fiction and its subcategories, feminist and queer crime. A comparative analysis of three mysteries from each collection demonstrates the converging and diverging tendencies of feminist and queer representation in turn-of-the-twenty-first century crime narratives. Feminist mysteries by Edith Kneifl, Birgit Rabisch, and Barbara Neuhaus shift generic conventions by aligning narrative perspectives with a feminist world view that destabilizes male-dominated structures through the intervention of a strong female figure who successfully closes the case. By contrast, queer mysteries by Thea Dorn, Ursula Steck, and Susanne Billig destabilize generic conventions and structures of identity altogether, highlighting misreadings and unsolved mysteries through parody, double entendre, and open endings. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol35/iss1/8 Dialogues with Tradition: Feminist-Queer Encounters in German Crime Stories at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century Faye Stewart Georgia State University The 1990s witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of fictional female policewomen, detectives, and investigators who took on roles inhabited, until the 1970s and 1980s, almost exclusively by men. The twentieth century was not the first to see female investigators in German-language crime literature: with the invention of Fraulein von Scuderi in 1819, E.T.A. Hoffmann was decades ahead of Edgar Allan Poe’s first male detective.1 Scuderi, however, differs in significant ways from the detectives who walk in her footsteps almost two centuries later. The creation of a male author, Scuderi solves crimes with recourse to character traits ascribed specifically to her gender.2 By contrast, female investigators of the 1980s onward, many of whom are created by women, refuse to take gender difference as a given, but rather question and challenge gender categories, empower themselves in the face of patriarchal structures, and push feminist and queer agendas. At the millenium, the poetics and politics of crime stories continue to evolve such that readers witness considerable variations between mysteries of the 1990s and the early 2000s. How much difference can a decade make? This essay identifies key shifts in feminist and queer crime narratives through an analysis of two anthologies, Pieke Biermann’s Mit Zorn, Charme, und Methode oder: Die Aufklarung ist weiblich! ‘With Wrath, Charm, and Method or: Enlightenment is Feminine!’ (1992) and Lisa Kuppler’s Queer Crime: Lesbisch-schwule Krimigeschichten ‘Queer Crime: LesbianGay Crime Stories’ (2002), which open up crime fiction to previ1 Stewart: Dialogues with Tradition: Feminist-Queer Encounters in German Cri Published by New Prairie Press