The girls who don’t die: subversions of gender and genre in recent fiction by Lauren Beukes

Abstract

This article attempts to homogenize gender theory and genre studies in order to build a suitable lens for analyses of Beukes’ texts. The central argument posits two of her novels, Zoo City and The Shining Girls, as trans-gressive examples of crime fiction, suggesting that the writer crosses conceptual borders by disrupting the mutually defining expectations of gender and genre. The significance of these acts of disruption is, primarily, that of refusing erasure: the bodies and lives of women are often, ironically, marginalized in their very scripting and narration. Secondly, there is the suggestion that the disruption of clean-cut generic expectations is an “act of genre” (Jacques Derrida Acts of Literature) which performs and, embodies the contextual shifts within contemporary South African literature and the cultural imaginary.