The gendering power of genres: How female Scandinavian crime fiction writers experience professional authorship

Abstract

This article introduces the notion of genre as an analytical category for the study of gender inequality in creative work. Research on gender and creative labour typically identifies external, systemic and structural causes for gender inequality in media industries. In contrast, I argue that genres, by virtue of their internal, structural and discursive patterning, play a constitutive role in regulating media producers’ gendered professional identities, shaping their struggle for recognition and structuring their economic sustainability. Rather than being merely outcomes of production processes, genres shape gender inequality: They possess gendering power that influences how media producers work, think and feel. Gendering and gendered genre norms that privilege ‘masculine’ over ‘female’ values are so hard-wired in occupational practice and professional codes of conduct that the genre itself becomes a control and boundary ascription mechanism that implicitly governs, sustains and reproduces gendered identity formation, career aspirations and biographical standing. Drawing on in-depth interviews with female producers of Scandinavian crime fiction, globally branded as Nordic Noir, I examine how female writers in Denmark have coped with and experienced the gendering effect of the genre in which they work and to which they are financially beholden. I also tease out the ways in which crime fiction, a masculine genre, causes anxiety of authorship and affects female producers’ identity and boundary work. This focus on the gendering power of genres may potentially help us understand the gender disparities in media industries – disparities that endure despite efforts at policing fair access and equal opportunity.

Women are notoriously under-represented in media industries. The media production field is riddled with ‘unmanageable inequalities’ (Jones and Pringle, 2015), including gender-based discrimination, exclusion, abhorrent levels of sexism and, not least, yawning pay gaps (Gill, 2002; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2015; McRobbie, 1998).

Students of media industries are virtually unanimous in identifying the primary causes of this objectionable gender disparity as being external, structural and systemic. Flagrant gender inequalities are most commonly ascribed to the pervasive informality of creative work, on one hand, the informal governance of creative labour markets (Baumann, 2002; Blair, 2001; Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2012) and, on the other, the increased informalization of workplace hierarchies and managerial control (Ross, 2003; Nixon and Crewe, 2004). When formal labour market devices, such as educational credentials or apprenticeship systems, are non-existent, and while short-term freelance work is prevalent, access to the industry and project-by-project mobility is regulated by social capital. Personal ties, friendships, connections and, most tellingly, ‘old boy networks’ instigate homophily – the tendency to hire people in one’s own gender, racial or cultural image. Informal hiring thus perpetuates homosocial reproduction: White male-dominated managerial structures in creative industries affect the structure of opportunity, triggering gender and racial inequality at all organizational levels (Tunstall, 1993; Wing-Fai et al., 2015). Industrial analyses validate academic scholarship on a larger scale. The latest Skillset survey of the United Kingdom’s creative workforce (2014: 3) warns of deterioration in ‘fair access’ and ‘equal opportunities’ as their large dataset bears evidence that ‘worryingly, the majority of respondents found jobs through informal recruitment methods’. In addition, the informal project-by-project work arrangements so common in media industries require constant ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘enterprising’ free labour in the form of ‘pitching’, self-branding and networking (Gill, 2002; Scharff, 2015), long unsocial working hours unevenly distributed throughout the year (Blair, 2001), as well as a worker’s readiness to bear the costs of insecurity and risk associated with temporary employment, including social insurance or sick pay (Menger, 2006; Ursell, 2000), all of which systemically discriminate against parenting women (Eikhof and Warhurst, 2013).

An additional upshot of the informalization of organizational and managerial structures in media industries is the prevalence of informal work environments, variously dubbed ‘bohemian cultures’ (Ross, 2003), ‘hedonistic workplaces’ (Nixon and Crewe, 2004) and ‘pub cultures’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011), which are found to be inimical to the career advancement of female producers. Informal work cultures blur the lines between work and home, friends and colleagues, and normatively posit intense after-work socializing and an always-on mentality that force female producers, who are socially expected to reconcile professional goals with caregiving responsibilities, to terminate their creative careers prematurely (Jones and Pringle, 2015; McRobbie, 1998).

But are the inequalities of media work attributable solely to external or structural forces? By arguing that gender inequality is shaped in an unmediated manner by market structures and organizational patterns, all of the above-mentioned studies harbour an implicitly mechanistic notion of gender inequality implying that if formalized and just institutional and organizational arrangements were in place, gender balance would naturally emerge. In contrast, I here provide further evidence (Alacovska, 2015a) that systemic and structural explanations do not account sufficiently for the complicated and ideologically laden gender inequalities of creative/media work that persist despite the nominal commitment of creative industries to structural procedures against work discrimination (Jones and Pringle, 2015). To explain the persistent gender inequalities in media work requires a fine-grained understanding of the internal dynamics of work as well as of workers’ internal patterns of meaning and action – patterns which in media work are inevitably genre-bound (Tunstall, 1993) in a context in which all genres are already always ideologically gendered (Gledhill, 2012). In this article, I thus argue that gender inequalities in media work are a function of the internally patterned gendering power of the genres (Butler, 1986; Derrida, 1980) within which media producers work and with which they professionally identify. Genres, by virtue of their formal gendered conventions of plot, character and fictional universe, provide the structuring ideology for the (re)production of gender inequalities in media work. In other words, gender inequality in media work is always mediated by and happens inevitably through the detour of genres.

What makes this contention especially pertinent is not only that media work cannot occur outside a specific genre and that so much of the professional gendered knowledge and skills with which media producers operate (even if unarticulated and tacit) is emphatically genre-specific (Bruun (2010) and Dornfeld (1998) on television satire and documentary production, respectively) but also that gender inequalities in media industries, rather than being generalized or diffused across organizational and production fields, seem actually to cluster in specific genres. Women’s under-representation seems contingent on particular genres. Genres become an invisible barrier – a ‘genre ceiling’ – to female participation in media work. Genres traditionally considered masculine are sparsely populated by women producers (Bourdieu, 1996; Tuchman, 1989).

A recent study (Smith et al., 2014) provides compelling evidence that women are persistently and overwhelmingly under-represented on screen and behind-the-scenes in Hollywood motion pictures released between 2007 and 2013. Some film genres are worse offenders than others: The comedy genre seems most hospitable to women, who comprise 36% of all speaking roles, while in the animation and action/adventure genres (traditionally considered male genres), women typically comprise only 22% of casts. These on-screen patterns are reflected in behind-the-scenes employment patterns. A large-scale statistical study (Lauzen, 2015) confirms that women holding behind-the-scenes jobs fared worst in the masculine genres of action and horror, and somewhat better in comedy and documentary, in all of the 250 top-grossing Hollywood movies released in 2014. Specific music genres, such as classical music, are notoriously hostile to women (Tsou, 2015). Furthermore, Dowd et al. (2005) establish a statistical link between gender disparities and genre-specific success, with female recording acts faring worse in historically masculine and critically acclaimed genres, such as rock and jazz. Studies of news-making document longitudinally that women producers are persistently under-represented in the sub-genre of ‘hard news’ – a masculine incarnation of the news genre associated with ‘quality’, ‘urgency’, ‘important matters’ and ‘informed citizens’, as opposed to its lowly female incarnation, that of ‘soft news’, tied to ‘interesting but less-important matters’, ‘human foibles’ and non-urgency (Tuchman, 1973: 112; Shor et al., 2015). Media executives are found ‘to typecast women writers’ into ‘female genres’ and so deny their right to work in purportedly ‘male genres’: ‘for example, no one wants to be the first to develop a script from a women writer for a big-budget action-adventure film’ (Bielby and Bielby, 1996: 449).

Although enduringly present, the genre ceiling has evaded sustained analytical scrutiny. This is because studies of labour and production in media industries not only turn a blind eye to ‘the blindingly obvious’ gender–genre occupational contiguity but also tend to treat genres reductively as classification categories, taxonomic labels and inventory tools for efficient promotion, marketing and external stakeholder communication (Bielby and Bielby, 1994; Lena and Peterson, 2008; Negus, 1999). Through this lens, genres are merely upshots of production, perpetually malleable to managerial and organizational decision-making.

In contrast, I take genres seriously on their own internal and structural terms. I treat genres not merely as passive outcomes of media production but as active ingredients – relatively autonomous, causally effective variables that influence the ways in which production is organized through professional producers mobilizing and deploying the autonomous, structural resources immanent in genres, such as plots or characters, to organize and perform work as well as adjudicate career progress.

In order to analytically and systematically probe the active and constitutive role that genres play in structuring and shaping media work and production, I follow the analytical procedures of ‘a structural hermeneutics’ (Ricoeur, 1971) as elaborated by the proponents of ‘the strong program of cultural sociology’, namely, Alexander (2006), Alexander and Smith (1993, 2006), Kane (1991) and Jacobs and Smith (1997). I also actively build on insights generated within rhetorical studies of workplace genres, such as memos in tax accounting (Devitt, 2004), journal articles in academic professions (Bazerman, 1988) and diagnostic notes in psychiatric clinics (Berkenkotter, 2001). These approaches all share an anti-representationalist and pragmatist conception (Rorty, 1982) of cultural codes, that is, genres, symbols, fictions, narratives and myths. Here, cultural codes are not treated as upshots of social power dynamics or as static, discursive and ideological representations of reality out there, but as powerful and active agents on their own which structure conduct and feeling in social life, and also as resources for accomplishing social action, in addition to being operative interventions in identity formation. According to Alexander and Smith (1993: 156), cultural codes ‘provide a non-material structure’ and ‘represent a level of organisation that patterns action as surely as structures of more visible, material structures’.

Genres, then, can also be expected to actively affect occupational gender dynamics in creative labour markets. If genres structure social institutions and provide categories for understanding social life, and if all genres are gendered, that is, predicated on gender ideologies and stereotyping (Derrida, 1980; Gledhill, 2012), then genres distinctly gender a cultural producer’s experience of media work. The genre norms relative to gendered plot, character, themes or settings erect symbolic boundaries between what is doable by or forbidden to male and female producers, and in this manner regulate identity work, career planning and social interaction. By according genres a robust, constitutive and active role, I hope to make manifest and so critically challenge the ideological power of genres to influence the ways producers think, behave and feel, which has long been taken for granted and so remained invisible and latently discriminatory in organizational worlds of media production. Thus, I introduce the notion of genre as an analytical category for the study of gender inequality in media work.

Through previous research, I became aware that the genre of travel writing, an androcentric non-fiction genre, causes an ‘anxiety of influence’ – making female writers constantly feel ‘demeaned’ and ‘unfit’ as professional travel writers (Alacovska, 2015a). Here, I set out to examine and corroborate the gendering power of another masculine but fully fledged fictional genre – the genre of crime fiction. Specifically, I investigate the identity and boundary work female writers perform in the production world of Scandinavian crime fiction (or Nordic Noir), a world that encompasses the national publishing fields of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland. For the purpose of this article, I focus mostly on Denmark, an egalitarian society that consistently ranks highest on indexes of gender equality and in which public debate about gender inequality is consequently limited and narrow, but also a country wherein the latest studies of work in creative industries suggest profound, albeit subdued and nuanced, gender inequality in terms of creative success and acclaim (Sommerlund and Strandvad, 2015) – all of which makes Denmark a promising site in which to investigate the gendering power of genres to subtly and latently influence, obfuscate and exacerbate gender inequality.

The genre of crime fiction has long been defined as a ‘tough-guy genre’ exuding ‘masculinism and misogyny’ (Scaggs, 2005: 77). As such, the genre has been ideologically appropriated for accomplishing bold feminist agendas through the insertion of female detectives (Scaggs, 2005). In turn, the genre becomes a venerable research site for the examination of feminist and post-feminist media reception and representation (Plain, 2001) as well as ‘narrative organisations’ (Czarniawska, 2006). Following these leads, I re-purpose crime fiction as a suitable case for exploration of the active, gendering, power of genres in the domain of media production and labour.

The article’s structure is as follows: I first elucidate the gendering power of genres and then proceed to elaborate on the pragmatist and anti-representationalist analytical frame of ‘structural hermeneutics’. After discussing issues of method and operationalizing the analytical credo of a structural hermeneutics, I show empirically how a female-gendered sub-genre of the androcentric genre of crime fiction, namely, femikrimi, functions as an aspirational and biographical control mechanism that provides the values, normative frames of reference and biographical templates mobilized or eschewed by producers in professional self-identification and self-exegesis geared towards affirming and sustaining a woman’s right to authorship in an androcentric (masculine) genre. Boundary work here will refer to the identity work that female writers do to cope and engage with masculine genre norms and values while negotiating the gendered boundaries between permissions/prohibitions and commerce/authenticity.

The gendering power of genres

Genre and gender are etymological siblings: ‘[T]he semantic scale of genre … always includes within its reach the gender’ (Derrida, 1980: 74). Gender, a biological type, and genre, a discursive category, are not as ontologically disparate as they may appear at first glance because ‘genders are genres’ (Appadurai et al., 1991: 9). Genres do gender, and gender discursively structures genres. Both genre and gender do something: They furnish culturally sanctioned, apposite or even normative models of feeling, experiencing, behaving and doing. Thus, they are both performative – sustained through performance in which social actors draw on cultural resources (scripts, proscriptions, conventions and repertoires) provided by gender/genres (Butler, 1986; Derrida, 1980). For Derrida (1980), the discourses of ‘both genres’ (understood as literary types and gender) are in a ‘relationless relation’ since together they not only ‘promise’ ‘sense, order and reason’ (pp. 74 and 57) but also stipulate: ‘“Do”, “Do not” says “genre”, the figure, the voice, or the law of the genre’ (p. 56). ‘Doing one’s gender’ implies doing it ‘in accord with certain sanctions and proscriptions’ learnt in the family or at school as genres and scripts to be acted out and upon (Butler, 1986: 525).

Gender is always generic, sustained by gendered genre-based imaginaries, aesthetic, cultural and ideological material, such as, for example, the pervasive imagery of the femme fatale in Western cultures (Butler, 1986; Modleski, 1988). And genres are always gendered, categorized along ‘an acculturated emotion-action axis that supports white, male power’ (Gledhill, 2012: 3; Tuchman, 1973). Both genre and gender ‘are governed by rules of inclusion and exclusion’ and thus genre classifications perpetuate gender divisions (Gledhill, 2012: 2).

The evaluative categorization of genres is indeed homologous to gendered hierarchization (Bourdieu, 1996): Low-prestige genres like romances or melodrama exude ‘inherently feminizing’ qualities, such as emotions, pleasures, sensuality and intuition, and are associated with women writers (and readers), while high-prestige genres, such as epics, philosophical treatises and adventure novels, possess masculine values – action, vigour, rationality and inquiry (Gledhill, 1997: 349) – and exclude women. Such genre and gender boundaries are symbolically legitimized, reinforced and normalized as gendered genre heritage through media discourse, such as newspaper coverage in the form of music or literary criticism (Schmutz, 2009), bestseller charts (Lena and Peterson, 2008), repertoires (Dowd et al., 2005) and canonization (Tuchman, 1989). Drawing on boundary theory, Vallas (2001: 12) suggests that ‘symbolic constructs and categories’ such as genres ‘often have their own material effects on the division of labour’ and ‘play a constitutive role in […] drawing distinctions among occupational groups’.

One feminist reception study after another demonstrates that women’s genres, situated on the emotion pole of the axes, such as soap operas or melodramas, and masculine genres, such as horror or adventure (situated on the action pole), provide opposite yet equally powerful gendering norms and proscriptions that influence the ways in which women readers/viewers think of themselves, fantasize about their lives and relate to patriarchal values (Livingstone, 1990; Modleski, 1988; Radway, 1984). However, before becoming categories of reception, genres are, by virtue of authors being their first ideal recipients, categories for labour and production (Alacovska, 2015a). By implication, genres should be expected to affect the behaviour of female producers and their biographical occupational selves as much as they affect female audiences. And yet the link between the gendering power of genres and producers’ identity work has hitherto been left unexamined in favour of examining recipients/audiences.

By providing and sanctioning gender–genre norms in the form of structural, symbolic and semiotic material, genres shape, structure and solidify gendered identities, including professional identities. Genres gender, erect and control the boundary between what is permissible or prohibited for writers to do in diegetic (fictional worlds) or extra-diegetic (biographical worlds). Male genres, such as crime fiction, exclude women; they interpellate media producers (Althusser, 1971) by carving out gendered biographical subject positions. As biographical studies of long-deceased authors contend (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979), women experience debilitating feelings of inadequacy and painful socio-ideological impediments (boundaries) to professional self-definition in masculine genres, that is, genres within which women do not have a socially and culturally warranted right to work. Such influence constitutes what Gilbert and Gubar (1979: 48) defined as female ‘creative inappropriateness’ to labour in male genres. Male genres cause female writers to suffer from ‘anxiety of authorship’ – a ‘radical fear that she cannot create’ and also ‘self-create’ within a male literary tradition (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979).

If we are to study genre-induced anxiety in contemporary media work, then we cannot ignore a genre’s own agency in gendering appreciations, behaviour and action and so perpetuating gender inequality. The question that arises is how to study the ‘material effects’ (Vallas, 2001) of an immaterial, cultural and symbolic category, as is the genre, on contemporary media work. Below I outline the analytical credo of ‘a structural hermeneutics’ refined by insights gleaned from pragmatist studies of genres and professional identities.

Structural hermeneutics: towards an investigation of the active (gendering) role of genres in media work

It is a central precept of ‘structural hermeneutics’ that cultural forms such as genres possess ‘relative autonomy’ from social determinations (Alexander and Smith, 2006). Owing to the internal relationships among variegated historical textual instances, genres provide autonomous formal models consisting of interlinked repertoires of plots, themes, characters and settings as well as ‘structures of feeling’ that are drawn upon, mobilized and acted with and upon in social life. According to Ricoeur (1971), cultural forms ‘symbolically mediate’ action, providing constitutive rules and standards of excellence by dint of which people organize, describe and evaluate life and action. Through this prism, social or political institutions are always grounded in cultural forms, whereby cultural forms exercise ‘enormous behavioural impact’ (Alexander, 2006: 55). If genre no longer functions as an abstract sign or representational system but as a resource or indeed interpretive and even behavioural matrix, then it has to be studied as a mediator of action and practice, that is, ‘an organizing material for action, motivation, thought, imagination’ (DeNora, 2003: 46).

A pragmatist understanding of genres becomes immediately evident: Genres ‘get-into-action’ (DeNora, 2003) and thus fundamentally pattern and order social institutions and procedural arrangements through social actors deploying the formal models in political or social practice. Treading this line of inquiry, Jacobs and Smith (1997: 61) convincingly demonstrate how a combination of two genres, romance and irony, provides the ‘organizing vocabularies of contemporary political cultures’. For example, the structural features of the romance, such as the ‘theme of ascent’ and optimism in which collectives and individuals pursue better or utopian future, provide ‘a strong mobilizing force’ in promoting ‘social change, participation, and inclusion’ (p. 68) while providing for ‘pragmatic success in encouraging solidarity, reflexive, tolerant and intersubjective public cultures’ (p. 67). Through an analysis of foreign policy intervention and military decision-making in the case of Arab leaders, Smith (2005) demonstrates how certain genres are strategically put to use by presidents, public administrators and journalists to achieve certain political ends. The genres of epic and romance, with the formal features of optimism, heroic characters and noble pursuits, were thus deployed to depict Nasser and so to pass through a ‘no-war policy’ with ‘a happy ending’ as opposed to the ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘tragic’ genre, predicated structurally on tragic error, horror and suffering that was mobilized to depict Hussein and so instigate a violent military intervention.

There is probably no more obvious place to study the influence (‘consequences’) of genres on action and social life than in the worlds of media/cultural production since all media work takes place within ‘genre-specific worlds’ (McKinlay and Smith, 2009; Tunstall, 1993) and since all media producers are, by default, either ‘genre specialists’ or ‘genre generalists’ (Pinheiro and Dowd, 2009; Zuckerman et al., 2003). Hence, media producers are to be expected to directly and actively mobilize genres in professional self-definition while ensuring their fitting in and attaining of full membership of genre-specific production worlds.

Moving the analytical pivot from the functioning of genres in ‘the civic sphere’ to the power of genres in media professions, one can say that media workers align their actions and performance with the formal models immanent in genres. All actions are held accountable to the norms, values and conventions set forth in genres. Genres underpin self-exegesis and the planning of future trajectories of action and interpersonal relations (Ricoeur, 1971). To Ricoeur, people think and act constantly in reference to specific genres. Burke (1998: 597) even defines genres as ‘equipment of living’ – ’strategies for dealing with situations’. In media work, genres are emphatically operative-in-practice, intervening in the ways media producers forge and sustain genre-appropriate authorial biographical selves (Alacovska, 2015a; MacIntyre, 2011); a biographical self is ‘determined … by the writer’s conscious and unconscious engagement with genre’ (Gaunt 1995: 9).

In order to investigate the active role of genres, one has first to establish ‘the analytic autonomy’ of genres (Kane, 1991) – to pinpoint the dominant structural and formal properties of genres, which are nonetheless socially shared and stabilized through a wide array of cultural artefacts and historical formations such as school books, canons, criticism, repertories and popular culture that form the genre heritage. This ‘analytic autonomy’ has to be then situated in concrete, lived, formulated and emoted ‘arenas of action’ as ‘concrete autonomy’ (Kane, 1991). By following empirically how actors turn a genre’s structural resources, such as plots, characters or narratives, into norms, values and codes of production and professional self-definition, we ‘operationalize’ the ‘analytic autonomy’ of genres. Hence, once the analytic autonomy of genres has been established, the analysis can proceed to interrogate the particularities and practices of engagement with the genre at concrete, local, historical and contingent events of ‘doing things with genres’ (Devitt, 2004), including ‘doing gender’ (Butler, 1986) in media production worlds.

That professional writers ‘do things with genres’ in concrete practical instances of text- and self-image production has long been argued by cognitive-pragmatic studies of the production of expert knowledge in the legal, medical and academic professions. Latching onto Miller’s (1984) seminal ideas of genres as social actions, such scholarship has concentrated on workplace writers and the role genres play in shaping their working and professional lives. This corpus of scholarly literature has long contended that genres are mediators of expert knowledge. A genre’s structural and conventional properties drive production and represent the principal source of emotional wherewithal on the job (see Bazerman (1988) on how the genre of scientific articles influences academic careers and Devitt (2004) on how the genre of tax memos structures the professional self-identification of tax accountants). Since through this prism all professional work is organized by genres, the investigation should always examine the professional writers’ activities and self-accounts against the background of genre-specific formal models. In other words, genre should be studied as ‘genre-in-use’ within specific professional activity systems (Berkenkotter, 2001).

Using this analytical framework, I examine how the masculine genre of crime fiction affects the professional self-definition of female writers within the Danish publishing field. I analyse how female crime fiction producers work out their professional self-image (identity work) and difference (boundary work) by mobilizing gendered genre resources (e.g. plot, character, themes, expression) in professional self-presentation and self-definition (both distinct work activities).

Method

For this study, I conducted 22 in-depth life-story interviews with 14 female crime fiction writers in Denmark who earned or were striving to earn the bulk of their income from crime fiction. The interviews lasted 2–3 hours each and were all recorded on tape. Anonymity and confidentiality were guaranteed in order to secure confidence and willingness to participate. To complement the interview material, I collected a substantial amount of self-presentational accounts as part of the participants’ efforts at ‘pitching’ and self-branding on social media (mainly Facebook, Instagram and Twitter).

It is a limitation of the research design to omit male writers – an omission that assumes all men write from a male-gendered perspective and so ascribes female-gendered identities only to women authors. Genre-induced anxiety is not only a female-associated phenomenon; men are also subject to the gendering power of genres, and future studies should take into consideration male writers’ responses to genre-mediated anxiety of authorship. However, given the long history of feminist appropriations of the genre of crime fiction in reception and cultural studies, this study generates its own internal validity through recasting the research focus from women recipients and discursive representations to female producers/writers and their actual subjective experiences of crime fiction writing.

Life stories, self-presentations and self-identities are necessarily choreographed through genres (McIntyre, 2011). Genres as ‘equipment for living’ (Burke, 1998: 598) size up, enshrine and shape the narratives people tell of themselves. Thus, we should expect a genre’s agency to be ever more pronounced in the life stories narrated by creative professionals who earn their livelihood in genre-specific worlds of production. Life-story interviews and social media self-portraits provide insights into how specific genres influence the way that participants self-imagine and self-define (Taylor and Littleton, 2006).

In order to trace the active role of genres in social contexts, I followed the methodological procedures suggested in ‘structural hermeneutics’ (Alexander and Smith, 2006). To turn the category of genres into ‘an independent variable’ with ‘causal specificity’ – affecting, rather than being affected by, social, material structures (Alexander and Smith, 2006) – I first established ‘the analytical autonomy’ of (Scandinavian) crime fiction through formal (structural) genre analysis (Andersen, 2008; Hejlsted, 2009; Scaggs, 2005), as well as by following its discursive stabilization through literary criticism, reviews, promotional material and book fair presentations. In this way, I established internal (gendered) genre patterning and its discursive resources, such as plot, themes, character and settings. I then proceeded to examine the genre’s actual operation in concrete social events of production and professional self-definition by following how participants mobilized genre resources as ‘equipment for living’ when telling life stories. This entailed first eliciting and then evaluating informants’ accounts against the backdrop of crime fiction’s ‘analytic autonomy’. The crime fiction’s analytical autonomy drove the iterative coding for themes. Hence, the interview excerpts are in effect the result of such genre-bound iterative coding: These are my informants’ self-interpretive accounts, which openly reference the structural models of crime fiction. At the same time, the genre of crime fiction was used as a researcher’s interpretive tool with which to ascertain the validity of data and control for genre-boundedness of self-exegesis (MacIntyre, 2011; Ricoeur, 1971).

The gendering power of crime fiction

Crime fiction has been traditionally considered an androcentric – masculine and conservative – genre featuring a male detective with a cerebral, analytical and inquisitive mind and his investigative work associated with masculine prerogatives involving logic/science/judgement/rationality/deduction: ‘In detective fiction gender is genre and genre is male’ (Plain, 2001; Roth, 1995: xiv). The male crime-writer triad of Doyle/Hammett/Spillane represents ‘the historicized “laws” of gender and genre’ which turns female writers into ‘outlaws’ (Walton and Jones, 1999: 8). Despite the prominence of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and P.D. James, female writers nonetheless ‘perform a masculine function’, rarely challenging the ingrained sexist assumptions of the genre-specific hero formation (Roth, 1995). The business and labour of crime fiction publishing is thus permeated with male-dominated genre norms and genre ideology, against which ‘outlaws’ are judged as unsuitable and inadequate labourers. Women are historically ‘criminalized’ – unauthorized and unlicensed to work in the crime genre. In turn, female crime fiction writers are constantly forced to do genre-appropriate identity work in an effort to negotiate the boundaries (injunctions and interdictions) of the androcentric genre and to defend their authorial right.

The severity and endurance of the crime fiction genre’s ‘outlawing’ power have triggered the formation of numerous crime writers’ societies for the purpose of combating discrimination against women in the genre. ‘Sisters in Crime’, the largest and most international association, sets out ‘to promote the professional development and advancement of women crime writers to achieve equity in the industry’.

Numerical evenness alone would not necessarily imply the emergence of a level playing-field, precisely because the rules of the genre by which all players are expected to abide are profoundly gendered and gendering. Even if numerical equity is achieved, the gendering ideology of androcentric genres is so ingrained in production practices and values that it becomes normalized, stabilized and interiorized anxiety, acting as a discrimination-generator. Because of this normalized and stabilized character, the genre-induced anxieties of authorship are often tacit and unarticulated, though always reflexively post-rationalized. The production of Scandinavian crime fiction is an emblematic case of this.

The number of female writers who are members of the Danish Crime Academy (Det Danske Kriminalakademi), a local crime writers’ society, is marginally higher than that of male writers. The participation of female crime authors at the venerable regional crime fiction book fair, Krimimesse, and the general Danish book fair, BogMesse, is comparable to that of men. Despite this seemingly equal participation of women, the gendering power of the genre has hardly disappeared. The masculine genre not only limits female access but also impedes their critical acclaim and serious consideration. Various constituents, such as award-deploying bodies, have legitimized the institutionalization of male dominance in the crime fiction genre and established the genre as a natural preserve of men. The Danish Crime Academy has awarded The Palle Rosenkrantz Award for Best Crime Novel to 22 men but only 8 women; it has honoured 7 women as opposed to 19 men as ‘a remarkable crime fiction debutant’. The prestigious Scandinavian crime fiction Glass Key Award has been given to only 3 female writers as opposed to 20 men. And in what came to be known as the ‘great Nordic crime feud’, the Scandinavian literary establishment publicly disparaged crime fiction written by women as worthless ‘femikrimi’ that destroys ‘good literature’. Yet, despite high-calibre public sexist attacks and institutionalized denial of recognition, there is almost no discussion – at least in public – of gender inequalities in Danish crime fiction publishing, the most lucrative publishing subset.

Against the backdrop of male genre norms, the ‘outlawing’ of women writers seems natural and just, whereas any act of contestation appears unqualified and professionally unadvisable. The gendered and gendering crime genre has normalized female exclusion and justified the diminution of their authorship while discouraging occupational dissent. Stabilized as standards of professional conduct and work routines, male genre norms have jeopardized and obstructed the economic sustainability and professional self-identification of Scandinavian female crime writers in complex and ambivalent ways. As I show in the following, genre-induced anxiety was the prevalent if surreptitious mode in which female writers privately discussed their professional biographical selves.

‘Nordic Noir’: the citadel of gender equality, or a lipstick stronghold?

Crime fiction originating from Scandinavia – a mixed genre of mystery, thriller and whodunnit – has become a global publishing phenomenon under the brand label of Nordic Noir. Books by Høeg, Nesbø, Larsson and Mankell have sold millions worldwide, becoming a mainstay of English, German and Chinese-language bestseller lists. Ever since their astronomical market success began, the global publishing world has been in quest of the ‘next Scandinavian crime king’ (Forshaw, 2012).

One of the main causes for the genre’s bestseller and blockbuster status, besides the exoticism of the Northern Lights, barren landscapes, generous welfare states and brooding introverted people, has been attributed to gender equality. Scandinavian crime fiction has been globally acclaimed for bringing to life some of the most remarkable female characters in the essentially male world of fictional crime investigation across media platforms, from Lisbeth Salander to Saga Norén and from Smilla to Sarah Lund (Agger and Waade, 2010; Forshaw, 2012).

However, all of the critically acclaimed characters have been produced by male authors – ‘Scandinavian crime kings’ who directly contribute to the stabilization of crime fiction’s gendered patrilineal heritage. Such ‘genre patrimony’ – a literary inheritance handed over by male precursors, according to Gilbert and Gubar (1979: 49) – is ‘profoundly debilitating’ and ‘paralysing’ to women writers, who are forced to constantly position themselves in relation to masculine genre norms, ideals and conventions.

In the early 2000s, female Scandinavian crime writers started challenging and self-reflexively resisting the inherited gendered boundaries of crime fiction. They spotted ‘an empty field’ (Tuchman, 1989) – a relatively untapped potential for a crime fiction sub-genre written by women, about women and for women, which came to be labelled by the Scandinavian literary establishment as ‘femikrimi’ (Hejlsted, 2009). Seeking motherly precursors, or what Gilbert and Gubar (1979) call ‘matrilineage’, ‘femikrimi writers’ latched onto American feminist crime fiction from the 1980s led by Sara Paretsky and Sue Graffton, as well as the British ‘crime sisterhood’ labelled Tart Noir. In order to justify their choice of genre and professional standing, many participants proclaimed an inborn ‘flair for crime’ sparked by intensive socialization in the genre through the reading of female crime writers:

I read a lot of mysteries when I was young. I’ve always admired female writers like Paretsky! She seemed like a fighter in the genre poking fun at the male genre. Instead of a whiskey-drinking ugly old male detective, her character drank margarita on high heels! So I started plotting. (Author, 8)

According to Hejlsted (2009), Nordic femikrimi extends its Anglo-Saxon matrilineage by featuring female detectives who are at the same time sexually attractive, responsible caregivers and empathetic yet simultaneously intelligent and successful problem-solvers. A femikrimi protagonist is the negation of the ‘hard-boiled’ fictional detective – aloof, violent, solitary, insensitive, egoistic, dishevelled and alcohol-addicted. A femikrimi is crime fiction with an explicit feminist agenda. Women’s relations with children, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, co-workers and crime victims are as central to the femikrimi plot as murder and investigation, which puts ‘gender concerns about balancing a job in a male profession with household duties’ as well as ‘the politics of sexual difference’ at the forefront (Andersen, 2008: 140–141). In a veritable act of boundary work, one of my informants justified her ‘unorthodox’, anti-male-genre aesthetic choices as follows:

I can’t stand those kick-ass heroines. Take Salander. She’s just so insensitive a loony. She’s just a male hero in a female body. We don’t need another hero! … What’s wrong with a female detective having a kid and a husband? What is wrong with her cooking meals? This is relatable. It sells because crime readers are women who love to hear about women’s everyday chores. (Author, 15)

Through the legitimation of ‘unorthodox’ ‘female’ genre choices, femikrimi was actually the epiphenomenon of an effort to transform crime writing from a profession dominated by man and infused with male genre norms into a profession with substantial market and aesthetic opportunities for women. Charlotte Jørgensen, the editor of the first Danish ‘femikrimi’ novel, opined, ‘This was something radically new. It did not exist in Denmark and that inspired me’ (Dannemand, 2007). Ever since, female writers have conquered the bestseller lists and outsold their male counterparts, auguring ‘the new era of Scandinavian crime queens’ (Kärrholm, 2011).

Despite or perhaps because of their popularity and market success, female writers started to be perceived as an emasculating hazard to the ‘manly’ genre. Femikrimi reawakened fears about the genre’s further feminization as crime fiction was already dangerously effeminate – enjoying a dismal reputation as a lowly, cliché genre in Scandinavia, although, owing to its firm positioning on the action pole of the emotion-action gendering genre axis, the genre of crime fiction has culturally ingrained pretentions to middle-brow status (Scaggs, 2005). It is precisely because of such ambivalent and shifting high–low culture categorization that the genre of crime fiction is perpetually subjected to ‘gendered turf-wars’ (Gledhill, 2012: 3). There is always a struggle between the prevalence of a low genre’s feminizing characteristics, such as cliché/empathy, for the victim/care for the other/hope in better society and a middle- or high-brow genre’s masculine traits of action/aggression/analytical acumen/achievement-orientation/closure.

When women enter the field, the social and symbolic value of a genre further erodes, so men decamp and leave it to women (Tuchman, 1989 on ‘novel’ writing). However, contrary to sociological premises, male crime writers did not abandon the genre but fiercely defended the genre boundaries (for a similar dynamics in the classical music genre world, see Tsou (2015)). Because femikrimi threatened to further demoralize and devalue (emasculate) male professional norms and values, it had to be publicly renounced and confined to a less-prestigious, women-only, corner on the genre’s perimeter.

The aesthetic choices made in this diegetic universe, such as the choice of female protagonists and her point of view, unsettled the extra-diegetic relations of power within a genre world predicated on male, hard-boiled, production routines, habits and conventions. Indeed, the case of Nordic femikrimi represents a propitious contemporary empirical substantiation of what Booth (1988: 227) observed long ago: Diegetic choices possess ‘an ethical force’ and ‘efferent effect’ that influences ‘the company authors keep’ – their relationship with colleagues and readers, collegial conduct and ethical responsibilities, as well as hostility, fights and rows.

In the summer of 2007, the Scandinavian male literary establishment (critics, reviewers, pundits) ‘unfriended’ female writers and publicly attacked femikrimi as ‘under-genre’ and ‘bad literature’, vehemently denying its innovative valence and its reformist power to reinvigorate the crime genre. The hostility spawned in Sweden quickly spread across Scandinavian literary worlds and spearheaded a vitriolic debate, since known as ‘the great Nordic crime feud’, which essentially questioned a woman’s ability to write in the genre. The accusations were sexist and malicious: ‘Female crime writers destroy literature with their simple plots and high ranking on the bestseller lists’ (Ranelid in Andersen, 2007); ‘literary Cinderellas aspiring to glamour and money’ (see Kärrholm, 2011); ‘bestsellers with no aesthetic substance’, ‘café-latte literature’ (Michaëlis, 2007); ‘femikrimi is equivalent to fast food’, ‘it can give you constipation’, ‘it makes you stupid’, ‘girly dreams disguised as thrillers’, ‘teenage horse-magazine aesthetics’, ‘chicklit’ (Parsson, in Michaëlis, 2009); ‘too much baby shit, dirty diapers and meatballs’, ‘lipstick prose’ (Andersen, 2008); ‘if men had written such trivial literature, they would long since have been expelled from the genre’ (see Holm, 2009); ‘menstrual bleeding is not suitable for the genre’ (Andersen, 2008). Such public shaming of femikrimi has had lasting adverse consequences for female writers’ professional standing and self-image.

Anxiety of authorship: ‘crime fiction shouldn’t ooze menstrual blood’

The femikrimi feud made visible the ways in which female writers have engaged with the professional heritage immanent in a masculine genre. Only when distressing events happen in a field of production do the unarticulated rules and habitualities of behaviour, which remain taken for granted and concealed in periods of ‘normalcy’, become observable (Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Alacovska, 2015b). The femikrimi feud intensified and so made transparent the otherwise implicit impact of a gendered genre on female struggle for recognition, self-definition and self-creation. In a genuine act of ‘inferiorization’, the feud heightened the subdued feeling of professional inadequacy that Gilbert and Gubar (1979: 50) called a perpetual ‘anxiety about the impropriety of female invention’.

The disparaging criticism reinforced the symbolic boundaries between female and male authorship already prefigured in the crime genre. Female authors deviated from the established male genre’s law; hence, their authorship was anomalous and troubled. In turn, female writers feel the constant need to defend their right to the genre and justify their ‘unlawful’ career choices. Aesthetic and diegetic choices have seeped into the ways female writers go about career sustainability and financial independence. They always re-assess and re-evaluate diegetic and aesthetic choices, as well as professional and economic choices, within the set of references provided by the ‘anomalous’ (sub-)genre of ‘femikrimi’. Paradoxically, in struggling for recognition and so countering the genre norms immanent in femikrimi, female writers have crafted their own professional identities, albeit always in reference to male-associated genre values:

At the outset, I almost identified with femikrimi. It was novel and promising. But eventually I did away with female characters. I’m still unable to develop a character at once a successful mother and a dedicated policewoman. When I’ve found an answer to that, I’ll put in a female detective. (Author, 4)

I thought femikrimi was a liberating thing, offering women a fair playground. Now I’ve come to hate it. I now devise a dyke detective to avoid domestic noir and romantic affairs that can get her pregnant. I don’t want my books to be judged on the basis of my detective’s or, God forbid, my femininity! I am a crime fiction writer not a femikrimi writer! (Author, 1)

Femikrimi is so insulting. It reeks of menstrual blood. Why don’t we have macho-krimi? Because we don’t live up to male standards?! Once I told off a journalist who suggested I wrote femikrimi. I write crime, pure and simple! (Author, 10)

Femikrimi, the latest symbolically gendered genre boundary, has come to organize the emotional and visceral experience of professional authorship. Gendered genre norms involved the workings of aspirational control regimes, which makes female writers shape their identity projects and professional self-identification always under the direct dictate of what is gender appropriate to the crime fiction genre. For example, for fear of antagonizing both the male readership and their male colleagues and publishers, female writers have started succumbing to male genre prerogatives. In this way, the gendered boundaries between the fictional world and the economic world of professional authorship have become permeable and fluid. Catering to as large an audience as possible is often only possible with a male lead protagonist. Similarly, the chances of profitable subsequent serialization are beholden to a detective who is mobile, tough and free – in a word, ‘un-female’. Hence, some of my informants punctuated their stories with open embracement of professional masculinity masked as natural gender-blind and genre-specific norms and values:

In order to succeed here you have to have balls! You have to write like a man! Otherwise you are out of the game! (Author, 4)

It’s exceptionally dumb to have a female lead. Once she gets pregnant you don’t have another action-driven book ready out for Christmas. Then you stay in the kitchen! (Author, 14)

The femikrimi feud further cemented what was appropriate to female expression and what was outright ‘prohibited’. The heftiest professional embargo, already an inextricable part of the ‘industrial lore’, was an oft-cited interdiction: ‘menstrual blood in the plot is forbidden; all the blood in crime fiction should come from a gun wound’ (Andersen, 2008; Michaëlis, 2009). This veto has become so ingrained in unwritten professional codes of conduct and horizons of expectations as to become almost imperceptibly interiorized by both writers and readers:

Whenever I present at fairs or do book signings, I always encounter men who ask if the book features a women detective. ‘If the detective is a woman, I don’t like it’, they say. So why alienate male readers? Menstrual blood is not appropriate, indeed! The accent should be on felony and bloody killings! (Author, 8)

Other informants, in contrast, self-consciously embraced the logic of femikrimi while resigning themselves to ensuing limited career progress. Complying with femikrimi formal models amounted to self-inflicted exclusion from professional acclaim:

I don’t write about important topics or characters. And that’s fine by me. My heroine is an overweight mother of two that does the groceries in a local supermarket. I have no illusion of winning a prize. The prizes are for the likes of X [an acclaimed male author], they’re dealing with serious topics, not me. (Author, 5)

Resentment and frustration permeate also women’s experiences of work. In a rare interview-based study of American female crime writers, Gouthro (2014: 365) finds that ‘the greatest nemesis for women is a nagging sense of self-doubt’. This self-doubt is unmistakably genre-induced. With few exceptions, my participants were viscerally aware of the gendered genre boundaries, injunctions and interdictions imposed on women. Before starting our conversation, one author handed me a black shopping bag. The freebie bag lavishly advertised the latest male-authored Salander crime novel at an annual book fair in Denmark. A large imprint on the bag read as follows: ‘You have to go after their weakest point. You have to become a warrior. Lisbeth Salander’.

I would have never written such a sentence and made it to the top. No woman could. This isn’t a plausible character, it’s a comic character … I feel that I could have garnered more flying-colour-reviews if I’d written as a man. I can’t shrug off this nagging sense of inadequacy. I write in the wrong genre, wrong topics, wrong characters, wrong everything. Are female stories not good enough? (Author, 3)

Gendered genre norms have been incorporated in the ‘identity regulation and work’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002) regimes in the entire field of crime fiction production. One author confided that organizational actors, such as publishers and marketers, often explicitly demand that women ‘write like a man’ and exclude female authors who fail to achieve the ‘manly’ genre requirements:

My book was rejected four times because I was writing about a male character. The rejection letters always stated that the detective wasn’t macho enough; it was not inquisitive enough, it was passive, you name it. (Author, 7)

Once editors accused me of writing torture porn crime! We women are programmed to be afraid since childhood, so what was wrong with gory prose that exposed the ways we women constantly fear darkness and mutilation? (Author, 8)

Male–female genre boundaries regulate even the material practices related to body and sexuality in self-promotion and self-branding. Femininity is unbefitting to the crime genre; hence, many participants feel compelled to discursively manoeuvre the boundary between gendered selves and gendered professional work. Here again, the boundaries between the diegetic world of the protagonist and the female writer’s biographical world tend to dissolve. Female writers confessed to ‘unsexing’ their public appearances to resist fitting into the pre-prescribed demeaning mould of ‘unartistic’ sexualized ‘Cinderella author’. In an effort to please literary critics/reviewers, women jeopardized their relationship with ‘exhibitionist publishers’, and vice versa. This tension revealed again the incessant quest to balance the ‘frustrating’ boundaries between commerce/authenticity and femininity/masculinity:

I always tone down my bodily appeal at promotions not to incur inappropriate wrath from critics. (Author, 5)

You don’t want to be evaluated as a writer on the basis of your femininity, yet the publishers ask you to unbutton a couple more buttons on the cover. When you refuse you annoy them. When you show your boobs you please publishing marketing departments but annoy the critics. It’s getting really frustrating. (Author, 3)

In addition, some participants openly resisted fictionalizing their femininity for self-promotional purposes. They strategically refrained from self-branding on social media since such branding could result in their own ‘gendered’ biographical self being equated with the ‘gendered’ protagonist. One author professed,

I deliberately don’t post any personal or private titbits on Facebook. My colleagues post photos of their kids or the dinner they’ve made or the night crème they’ve used to pander to women readers. I’d never put my personal life at stake to sell my books and female characters! (Author, 6)

The crime genre norms also upset a writer’s ethical sense of self. Genre norms regarding violence, killing, slaughter and rape have become ‘a matter of duty’ and an ‘author’s daily responsibility’ (Booth, 1988: 127), which is not easily reconcilable with women’s daily caregiving duties. ‘To dwell with a creative task for as long as is required to perform it well means that one tends to become the work’ (Booth, 1988: 128). ‘Becoming the work’ often looms psychologically large for female crime writers culturally and socially expected to perform nurturing, soothing and caring roles:

I kill for a living. However metaphorically, killing is my job description. I wake up, kill a couple of people on the paper, feed the kids, usher them to school, kill some more, make lunch … When I am in the wiring process I am unpleasant company and a bad mom. I am torn! How much neglect of kids is enough to get into the killing mood? (Author, 13)

Some informants confessed to organizing their family time around crime fiction. For example, one self-published author described how crime fiction permeates not only her work but also her family life:

Crime writing is a family thing. Crime fiction is the way we live our lives. I’m the author but in effect, all my family is engaged. Some days ago I was writing the scene about a victim killed in the forest. So with my man we have enacted the scene, tried out whether a body can really hang like that from a tree, measured the rope and the trunk. I used my son to figure out how far the voice can reach through the forest. All this helps write as realistically as possible and we enjoy spending time together in this way. (Author, 6)

Most of the time, female writers reported feeling that the official support received from writer societies and labour unions is inadequate to address the anxiety of authorship and the covert genre-induced discrimination. To compensate for the lack of institutional support, many female writers gathered informally together to carve a safe and comfortable space, albeit hidden from public eyes, in which they were able to tackle genre anxiety collegially and openly.

Conclusion

This article highlights the importance of the notion of genre for gender analysis of creative labour and suggests a genre-oriented ‘structural hermeneutics’ approach to examining the relationship between gender and work in media industries. It advances creative labour research by extending its conceptual toolkit with an analytical category indispensable for understanding the ‘unmanageable gender inequalities’ (Jones and Pringle, 2015) and the unconscious gender bias that permeate creative/media industries despite concerted efforts at policing fair access and equal opportunities.

Owing to their gendered heritage, genres ‘do’ genders (Butler, 1986). Genres provide the ‘citations’ – recursive gendered formal structural properties/norms/values relative to plot, character and themes, with which gender becomes iterative, stylized and so normalized as a natural order of ‘being’ and ‘doing’ (Butler, 1986; Derrida, 1980). Genres ideologically gender, latently enacting and enforcing gender boundaries, policing and stipulating what is normal, desirable and permissible for (wo)men to do, feel and imagine. The gendering power of genres is so normalized and ingrained in professional codes of conduct and occupational routines of creative labour that experiences of gender exclusion, discrimination and inequality remain unarticulated.

To grasp the persistent and unarticulated gender inequality in creative labour, we need to apply a ‘structural hermeneutics’ and so approach (gendered) lived work experiences not as a function of generalized, external, institutional or structural forces (as do most creative labour studies to date) but as a function of the autonomously gendered and gendering ideology of genres (Butler, 1986; Derrida, 1980). Genre should thus become both a unit of analysis (researchers investigating genre-specific worlds of production) and an independent variable (an internally patterned autonomous entity capable of affecting organizational dynamics and gender relations in cultural production) (Alexander and Smith, 2006). The study of genres as mediators of gender inequality in media work is thus the study of what Czarniawska (2006) called ‘coercive gendering’ as opposed to ‘discriminatory gendering’ in a workplace. Coercive gendering is reproduced through tacit and habitual organizational practices, and so it is far more insidious and subtler than discriminatory action, which is visible and measurable and hence legally sanctionable. Only by studying ‘coercive gendering’ as happening in and through genres, can we hope to tackle gender inequalities in media work and devise action plans to terminate discrimination.

The structural hermeneutics approach to gender inequality can thus be considered a communicative (‘communicology’) reading of gender identities in the creative professions (see Ashcraft and Mumby, 2004, on airline pilots) – a reading currently absent from creative labour studies. Further inquiry into the gendering power of genres in media work can benefit from a dialogue with the ‘Communication Constitutes Organisations’ (CCO) perspective whose scholars have pleaded influentially for the active and performative role that texts and genres play in organizational settings, especially in securing efficiency, control and coordination (Cooren, 2004, Schoeneborn, 2013 on the genre of Power Point in consultancy firms; Yates, 1993, on the genre of memos in 19th-century railways). This emphasis on genres generates research and empirical possibilities hitherto unexplored in creative labour studies.

This article has explored one such possibility by investigating the role played by the genre of crime fiction in perpetuating gender tensions and causing anxiety of authorship within the production worlds of Scandinavian crime fiction in Denmark. I have tried to show how the androcentric genre of crime fiction, by virtue of its male-dominated genre laws regarding characters, plot and setting, stabilizes and ingrains gender norms, values and ideals in professional codes of conduct and occupational standards by which career success and work quality are assessed. Gendered genres cause severe anxiety of authorship.

This genre-induced gendered anxiety of authorship remained concealed until the eruption of ‘the great Nordic crime feud’. The ‘femikrimi’ feud made visible and transparent the internal gendering dynamics of the masculine injunctions and interdictions (Butler, 1986; Derrida, 1980) immanent in the crime fiction genre. A wide array of constituencies, from literary reviewers to university professors and pundits, stabilized femikrimi and female crime authorship as anomalous, deficient and unworthy. In this way, the gendered genre boundaries, norms and values have become stigmatization mechanisms that regulate and control how women writers forge professional identities, biographical self-definition and aspirations, and go about sustaining their authorial careers. To justify their right to the crime fiction genre, female writers have had to reaffirm the legitimacy of their occupational and career choices, such as the inclusion of female protagonists, by constantly drawing on the (gendered) structural and ideological resources provided in the genre. Female crime fiction writers thus engage in constant boundary-negotiation and boundary-contestation practices as part of their identity work projects.

The analysis of Scandinavian female crime writers also has implications for the struggle to achieve more open, diverse and inclusive organizations of media production. Only by attending to the genre-specific gendered heritage can we broach issues of diversified work environments. Care and respect for differences in media industries can only be successfully enacted within genre-specific production worlds because it is in and through genres that gender inequalities are lived and experienced.