‘It’s my only hour of quiet’: the women’s online book club on ‘domestic noir’ during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on recent fieldwork from my doctoral research conducted with women readers over 3 months in the form of ‘domestic noir’ book clubs, this paper focuses on one of the women’s reading groups that was organized at the beginning of 2020. This study aims to understand women’s interaction, interpretation and experience with the crime subgenre read during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this book club, the domestic space became the focal point of the discussion on ‘domestic noir’ but also the participants’ experience of the pandemic. Domestic noir’s thematic portrayal of the dangerous and claustrophobic Gothic home, domestic violence as well as stereotyped femininity were highlighted during the discussions and functioned as a catalyst for exchanges of personal experiences of loneliness, gendered fears and burnout for the participants. The book club created community and solidarity with each other’s experiences, which raised their political consciousness through discussions. This article explores the ways in which participants read, discuss, construct and resist meaning making of domestic noir books. I argue that reading and discussing the domestic noir within these circumstances allowed participants to reflect on and relate to gendered experiences of the home, heightened gender inequalities and the fragility of women’s rights and positions.