“It's the Beast Thing”

Abstract

This article examines the representations of men and masculinities in contemporary crime narratives featuring a female protagonist. These “chick dick” stories (which adapt elements from the hardboiled detective novel, film noir, chick lit, and chick flicks) repeatedly engage with the gendered power dynamics made visible and problematic through the intersection of “chick” and crime genres, most particularly the sexualization of violence. In these narratives, popular masculinities operate as deployable concepts to dramatize contemporary gender relations. By tapping into the popular sentiment of a “crisis in masculinity,” chick dick texts also mobilize a rhetoric of unrepresentable male victimization and individual male pathologies. This strategy highlights the spaces and places in which masculinities are made vulnerable at the same time as it offers simplistic and individualized explanations for the systemic sexualized violence that dominate these narratives.

Keywords:

• masculinities
• crisis
• postfeminism
• detection
• sexual violence
• victimization

Notes

1. Robert Hanke (1990, 1998) draws on Connell's work, substituting “conservative” for “complicit.” I prefer Connell's term “complicit,” as it immediately denotes the investment these masculinities have in maintaining patriarchy.

2. Masculinity is not bound to a male body, just a social construction affixed most normatively to the male body. Bearing in mind that the “masculinity produced by, for, and within women” is one of many masculinities, I focus here on articulations of male masculinity (Judith Halberstam 1998, p. 15).

3. This references the prison experiment carried out at Stanford University by Philip Zimbardo in 1971. Initially designed to run for two weeks, Zimbardo ended the experiment after only six days because of how quickly the volunteer student “guards” became brutal and sadistic, and the “inmates” highly stressed and/or depressed. See Philip Zimbardo's (2007) The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil for his detailed discussion of this experiment.