Acting Out or Working Through: Trauma, Pedagogy and Feminist Crime Fiction

In this article, I explore the educational value of genre fiction through an account of the tensions that emerged within a fourth-year undergraduate course on feminist crime fiction. In the first section, ‘Crime Fiction as a Literature of Trauma’, I identify crime fiction as a genre that lends itself almost organically to the analytical framework provided by trauma theory (and, by extension, psychoanalysis). In the second section, ‘(The Traumatic) Lives of Girls and Women’, which is loosely structured as a retrospective case study, I use trauma theory as a framework for exploring the interpersonal dynamics of the classroom itself. While I establish a context for these dynamics through a discussion of several texts on the course reading list, including Maggie Nelson's The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial, the main focus of this section is on my students’ unexpected responses to two novels, Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Denise Mina's Garnethill. The final section, ‘In Conclusion: The Overabundant Studio of Resistance’, is an account of my reaction to these responses and functions as both a cautionary tale about pedagogical failure and a call for critical self-awareness on the part of instructors engaged in teaching difficult texts.