10 - Girls in the Gay Bar: Performing and Policing Identity in Crime Fiction

Summary

Feminist authors of crime fiction take several approaches to politicizing and queering the genre: recasting the traditionally male detective as a woman and assigning her agency in a male-dominated environment; stressing the implications of gender and sexuality in the crime and its investigation; and vesting the sleuth with sexual subject status. Contemporary German writers Thea Dorn and Christine Lehmann combine these approaches, adapting and subverting the crime genre in novels that emphasize the interplay among literary conventions, reader expectations, and constructions of gender and sexuality. In so doing, these authors inflect their writing with critiques of stereotypes, discrimination, and privilege. Dorn and Lehmann do not stop there, however: they further demonstrate the ways in which the fluidity and malleability of their androgynous female detectives’ genders can pose challenges to male-embodied authority, proposing that power lies in the performative intermingling of masculine- and feminine-gendered attributes. Dorn’s Anja Abakowitz and Lehmann’s Lisa Nerz style themselves according to the gender identities that serve their desired strategic purposes in specific situations, passing for male when necessary, as they do in order to enter the exclusive space of the gay men’s bar. The female investigators’ successful penetration of an establishment for men not only troubles gender norms but also furthers the crime plot. These gender-bending performances in the gender-specific spaces of Dorn’s and Lehmann’s crime novels queer mystery fiction conventions, directing our attention to sexism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination—while also underlining the potential instability of social boundaries predicated on gender and sexual identity. They ask us to consider the enduring masculinity of social institutions such as academia and politics, which remain heavily male and less accessible to women, even at the turn of the twenty-first century.

This essay develops a reading of Thea Dorn’s Berliner Aufklärung (Berlin Enlightenment, 1994) and Christine Lehmann’s Harte Schule (School of Hard Knocks, 2005) as socially critical crime novels that take to task the persistence of gender and sexual discrimination in contemporary Germany. The basis of this interpretation is the analysis of a key scene from each novel in which the female investigator masquerades as a man and goes to a men-only gay bar in order to interact with a suspect.