Detecting Canada: Essays on Canadian Crime Fiction, Television, and Film

7. A Colder Kind of Gender Politics: Intersections of Feminism and Detection in Gail Bowen’s Joanne Kilbourn Series

151 CHAPTER 7 A COLDER KIND OF GENDER POLITICS: INTERSECTIONS OF FEMINISM AND DETECTION IN GAIL BOWEN’S JOANNE KILBOURN SERIES Pamela Bedore If we conceive of feminism as more than a frivolous label, if we conceive of it as an ethics, a methodology, a more complex way of thinking about, thus more responsibly acting upon, the conditions of human life, we need a self-knowledge which can only develop through a steady, passionate attention to all female experience. (Rich 213) Finding ways to achieve the kind of feminism Adrienne Rich describes has proven difficult for women writers of detective fiction, who work, as George Grella and others have shown, in a genre that appears to be fundamentally conservative. After all, the basic narrative of a detective story contains social disruption (crime), epistemological inquiry (detection), and return to social order (solution). As women writers have been increasingly drawn to detective fiction as a space for developing feminist characters since the 1970s, feminist critics have also undertaken a re-evaluation of the genre’s potential for subversion.1 In the wake of feminist celebration of Kate Fansler, Carolyn Heilbrun’s feminist academic detective, Teresa Ebert has pointed to a very real problem in the construction of feminist thought within the genre of detective fiction. In reading Death in a Tenured Position (by Carolyn Heilbrun writing as Amanda Cross), a novel in which the first female professor in Harvard’s English department is killed, Ebert CHAPTER 7 152 acknowledges the feminist critique accomplished by Kate Fansler—and by Carolyn Heilbrun—but suggests that the narrative as a whole articulates a “patriarchal feminism” (15) or a feminism that seeks a place for women within patriarchal institutions without overthrowing such institutions. To Ebert, women detectives—and the readers who might identify with them— enforce patriarchal notions around law and order rather than trying to break down those oppressive traditions. A woman detective, then, may engage in important gender critique, but the very act of detection is “an ideologically encoded practice that enlists its practitioner in a form of disciplinary authority that benefits patriarchal capitalism” (14). Although Ebert characterizes this patriarchal underpinning as inherent to the detective genre, Gail Bowen seems to avoid this critique in her Joanne Kilbourn series, which features a middle-aged Saskatchewan woman whose professional life—as a political activist and speechwriter, a political science professor, and a TV analyst—is regularly interrupted by the apparatus of unfounded accusations, misleading evidence, and personality clashes that keeps readers of amateur detective stories turning pages. But Bowen provides considerably more than the incentive to turn the pages in this series. In the tradition of other feminist detective writers such as Heilbrun , Bowen uses the detective genre as a site for feminist explorations; as Heilbrun has noted, “with the momentum of a mystery and the trajectory of a good story with a solution, the author is left free to dabble in a little profound revolutionary thought” (7). Bowen accomplishes particularly complex feminist dabbling by overlaying Joanne Kilbourn’s gender politics with the provincial politics to which Jo has devoted much of her adult life. The series thus is able to speak to current issues within feminist theory as well as to questions regarding the potential of detective fiction to move beyond what has generally been considered its conservative ethos. Bowen’s series represents feminism as a contested terrain within the framework of Jo’s political career as well as her personal politics. Although I would certainly not suggest that Gail Bowen is a more successful feminist writer than Carolyn Heilbrun, the Joanne Kilbourn series is in some ways more nuanced in its use of the detective genre to represent key problems within today’s climate regarding not only gender dynamics themselves but also conversations around gender dynamics. Because Jo does not explicitly identify as a feminist—although she would probably consider herself a moderate feminist—she repeatedly finds herself under attack by women who see her as complicit with a patriarchal system whose existence in the world today she does not openly acknowledge. However even as Jo A COLDER KIND OF GENDER POLITICS | PAMELA BEDORE 153 embraces the simplistic notion that gender equality has been achieved, she is continually confronted with evidence to the contrary in her investigations of crimes and the ways those investigations reflect on her own personal relationships . By making Jo a smart and compelling character with a major...