Hard & Soft : The Male Detective´s Body in Contemporary European Crime Fiction

Abstract: In the thesis popular culture is treated as an important site of meaningcreation and crime fiction is studied as a social technology, as producing and reproducing strategies of engendering.The thesis is a comparative study of six crime fiction detectives from fiveEuropean countries: Sweden, Finland, Scotland, Spain, and Italy. Its mainfocus is to study the interrelations of three socially constructed categories,those of the body, masculinity and detectiveness. The analysis deals withfirst, the ways in which gender is produced through the body, and second,the intersections between the body, masculinity and detectiveness.Instances of embodiment-either of the explicitly mentioned body or theimplied body-are treated as performatives which participate in the construction of the detective's body/masculinity.A thematic approach is used. The themes analysed are selected becauseof their particularly interesting communicative capacities as regards themain focus of the thesis, the processes of masculinisation of the detective's body. The themes are: the penis, the body and technology, woundedness, obesity and ageing, food and eating, and the detective's significant others, i.e. murderers, murder victims and women as objects of desire.A comparison of North European, Protestant, and Mediterranean, Catholicdetectives is made to illustrate the differences in the ways in which bodies become masculinised in the two parts of Europe.