From Resigned Victim to Vengeful Perpetrator - An Examination of Strategies Employed by Female Protagonists to Confront Victimhood in Domestic Noir

School of English Research Talks Series:  
From Resigned Victim to Vengeful Perpetrator - An Examination of Strategies Employed by Female Protagonists to Confront Victimhood in Domestic Noir

The research talk explores female victimhood and agency in domestic noir novels, examining the strategies used by the novels’ female protagonists to cope with, and eventually overcome, their roles as victims. Domestic noir, a subgenre of the larger crime fiction genre, has steadily grown in popularity since the release of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl and marks a significant departure from other subgenres of crime fiction in its depiction of women as violent protagonists who appear triumphant over their male abusers. Drawing on a variety of philosophical and sociological theories, the talk analyses the heterosexual marriages in three prominent domestic noir novels, namely Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012), The Silent Wife by A. S. A. Harrison (2013) and The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (2015), exploring how the four aspects of inversion of normative feminine and masculine behaviour, gender performance and masquerade, female victimhood and agency, and the relationship between gender and violence are portrayed in these novels.

Details 
Date: 8 April 2022, Friday
Time: 17:00 to 18:00 (GMT+8)
Location: Webinar via MS Teams 

About the speaker: 
Enakshi Samarawickrama is currently pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. Her thesis is on the portrayals of different types of female victimhood and the femininities and masculinities in domestic noir. She is interested in researching portrayals of gender in crime fiction, the power dynamics at play between femininities and masculinities and the concepts of female victimhood, violence and agency.