Crime fiction scholarship has a strong tradition of work that examines the contributions of authors who utilize the form of crime fiction to promote gender equality. This tradition of writing, and scholarship, might be broadly characterized as gender focused. In recent years, many contemporary writers and scholars of crime fiction have extended this focus on gender into a broader critique of the social, economic and political systems that contribute to women’s oppression around the globe. This approach might be characterized more broadly as gender situated. Such gender-situated writers use the conventions of crime fiction to combat specific, endemic challenges posed by gender inequality and patriarchal systems in different locations worldwide.  Using these terms may help both to highlight a tradition of texts using crime fiction’s conventions to challenge gender-based discrimination directly and the continuity between those texts and others that use those conventions to surface the significant differences between the sociocultural systems that impact women around the globe. That is, these terms may help us distinguish between gender-focused crime fiction, which primarily interrogates sexism and misogyny, and situated-gender crime fiction, which extends that project by examining how gendered oppression is produced through the specific social, political, economic, and cultural systems of particular places. The interrelationship between the terms is such that gender-situated novels continue the work of gender-focused novels by examining the crimes that arise from broader societal, systemic inequalities that disproportionately disadvantage and injure women. 

For this seminar, then, we are seeking contributions that examine gender-situated crime novels from around the globe. We are hoping for a discussion of gender-situated novels that, rather than presenting sexism and misogyny as solved problems, instead build on the premises established by gender-focused novels to explore how gender discrimination contributes to or is exacerbated by broader crimes of social, economic and political discrimination that emerge as a result of distinct patriarchal power structures around the world. Papers that think through how situated-gender novels apply a focus on the autochthonous social, economic and political systems that disadvantage women and gender-nonconforming individuals in specific cultures outside the Anglo-American tradition are particularly welcome. This seminar series, in various forms, has run at ACLA almost every year since 2015 and we are keen both to welcome back longstanding contributors and to bring in new voices.