Resisting Invisibility

Book excerpt: Engaging with pre-feminist and male-authored crime literature, Resisting Invisibility offers a comparative reading of women’s bodies as represented in Spanish crime literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Utilizing the twin concepts of visibility and invisibility, the book establishes a genealogy of differing viewpoints regarding women’s positions in these narratives, before and after the birth of the modern Spanish female detective. This examination of the politics of female visibility expands our understanding of the aesthetic regimes that have governed the female body from the early phases of the genre’s evolution. While most scholars understand the feminization of the crime genre as a response to second-wave feminism, Resisting Invisibility demonstrates that even in the earliest representations of delinquent women, the politics surrounding the female body are problematized and are more complex than previously conceptualized. Drawing on gender and queer studies, Resisting Invisibility investigates the gendering of crime fiction, forcing us to reconsider the literary history of female visibility and prompting us to establish an alternative genealogy for Spanish crime literature.