Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 104

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Popular Culture Review

then, Perry’s liminal nurse-detective, in spite of her nostalgic shortcomings,
unsettles—even “unfixes”—such categories, embodying both their interrelatedness,
and their complexity, in a genre perhaps only recently open to such possibilities.
San Diego State University

Jennifer S. Tuttle

Notes
1. Women have, of course, been writing and sleuthing in detective fiction since its origins
in the nineteenth century; Rich charts how the genre has been used in new ways by
recent feminist writers.
2. There is some scholarly debate about whether detective fiction by definition inscribes
traditional norms of gender and reifies the existing social order. For arguments asserting
that it does, see, for example, Rosalind Coward and Linda Semple, “Tracking Down the
Past: Women and Detective Fiction,” From My Guy to Sci Fi: Genre and Women s Writing
in the Postmodern World, ed. Helen Carr (London: Pandora, 1989) 39-57; and Cora
Kaplan, “An Unsuitable Genre for a Feminist?” Women s Review 8 (June 1986): 18-19.
Other scholars have shown, however, that the genre is not always or uniformly
conservative. See Scott Christianson, “Talkin’ Trash and Kickin’ Butt: Sue Grafton,”
Feminism in Womens Detective Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995)
127-47; and Maureen T. Reddy, “The Feminist Counter-Tradition in Crime: Cross,
Grafton, Paretsky, and Wilson,” The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction
and Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (Macomb,
IL: Essays in Literature, 1990) 174-87. It should also be noted that ethnic detective
fiction is known for its appropriation of generic conventions in order to undercut social
hierarchy and inequality. See espe