Katy Shaw
Leeds Beckett University, UK
Abstract
Gender
politics is at the heart of what crime novelist Hakan Nesser called ‘the
strange genre of Nordic Noir’ (quoted in Foreshaw 2012: Preface), a
contemporary body of writings with historical roots in a heavy political
subtext that betrays a wider dissatisfaction with both the demise of the
welfare state and the ideal of post-war utopianism in contemporary Scandinavia.
Steig Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2005) quickly became regarded
as a key example of the emerging new genre of Nordic Noir and one of the
biggest global publishing phenomena of the twenty-first century. As a result of
its popular female protagonist, Lisbeth Salander and section headings featuring
damning statistical data about male violence against women in Sweden, the novel
has been celebrated as a vessel for Larsson’s ‘deep feminist sympathies’
(Whitelaw 2010).
Challenging
claims that the novel offers a vision of female empowerment, this article
instead suggests that Larsson uses his first fiction, and the wider Millennium
Trilogy of which it is a part, to create and cull female characters using the
men who ‘hate’ them as representations of the competing tensions between
masculinity and violence in the new genre of Nordic Noir. Nordic Noir is the
product of claustrophobia, of small countries in the midst of population
crises, frustrated at a lack of safety promised in the post-war years and
experiencing a growing lack of faith in the authorities governing them. This
article suggests that beneath popular imaginaries of seemingly peaceful and
equal societies, Nordic Noir exposes violent masculine authority as an
expression of the relationship between the individual and the neoliberal state
in the twenty-first century.
Keywords: Nordic Noir, Gender, Politics, Genre
Fiction, Steig Larsson.
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