Dominique Manotti and the roman noir

Abstract

Dominique Manotti's crime fiction novels have as their setting a variety of contemporary political and economic issues, a deliberate choice for an author who sees her work not as traditional detective novels, where order is reestablished upon the resolution of an individual crime, but rather as romans noirs, where crime is the product of a dysfunctional society. As a female crime writer, Manotti has rejected the notion of a distinct genre of "polar féminin" together with the ghettoization implicit in such a notion. The aim of this paper is to consider Manotti's contribution to female-authored crime fiction in France, in the light of her opposition to the notion of a "polar féminin." Her choice of a gender-neutral pseudonym, the featuring of a male detective in her earlier novels, and the adoption of sociopolitical themes in her work would seem to suggest that gender is not a primary concern. However, closer consideration of a selection of novels suggests that Manotti does reflect on questions of gender, although not always from a feminist or even a uniquely female perspective. Particular attention will be paid to the representation of marginalized gender, sexual, and ethnic identities in her novels, and to the way in which she goes beyond simplistic sexual binarisms that define women as victims and men as their oppressors to offer a more nuanced contribution to female-authored crime fiction than is suggested by the term "polar féminin.