The femme vivante: she won’t die, she won’t shut up and she doesn’t want you to f*** her [Presentation]

In this paper I will explore the relationship between gender and violence in contemporary crime and thriller fiction. Incorporating recent debates around ‘dead girl’ tropes, revenge dramas and theories of the gaze, I will explore the process of writing in a genre that, until relatively recently, has been saturated with dead women. Focusing on a selection of pivotal works from the past fifteen years including Gone Girl, My Sister the Serial Killer and Bad Sisters, I will discuss the shifting fashions of female representation in crime fiction from faceless victims and unreliable narrators to ruthless cops and caustic murderers.
I will suggest and reflect upon a new kind of female protagonist – the ‘femme vivante’ or ‘living woman’ - who sits alongside the femme fatale in contemporary fiction (across literature and visual media) as a woman who either hunts the killer, cannot be killed, becomes the killer or refuses to stay silent. She is the stubborn, powerful, middle-aged, emotionally problematic (frequently sexually adventurous) front woman of shows like Mare of Easttown, Happy Valley and Killing Eve, and she is also the killer-with-a-heart in female-led revenge dramas like Bad Sisters and My Sister the Serial Killer, as well as cropping up in a slew of recent works that explore crime fiction from the survivor's perspective (Girl A, The Girls and Women Talking).
These protagonists now frequently appear in true crime tales of vengeful wives, in female-led detective procedurals, and in mainstream comedy-dramas that push complex women with scores to settle centre-stage. In some respects, these narratives can be seen as a riposte to all those old crime stories of female victims and male aggressors, a loud and vengeful reaction against the beautiful, silent, dead girl.
The femme fatale has evolved. She’s not deadly – she’s exuberant. Less ice cold, more on fire. She’s a survivor, she’s a hunter, she’s a killer. She’s the future. With violence against women and girls at ‘epidemic’ levels, can escapism and hope be found in radical crime fiction that reframes outmoded gender tropes and upends victim/killer archetypes?