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/lp/edinburgh-university-press/culpable-maternal-detectives-the-impossibility-of-a-caring-ecofeminist-rxRDzhL0B2
- Publisher
- Edinburgh University Press
- Copyright
- Copyright © Edinburgh University Press
- ISSN
- 2517-7982
- eISSN
- 2517-7990
- DOI
- 10.3366/cfs.2021.0045
- Publisher site
- See Article on Publisher Site
Abstract
In Kate Atkinson's ecofeminist crime novel Started Early, Took My Dog, the (semi-)retired investigators Jackson Brodie and Tracy Waterhouse at once collude with and wish to change exploitative capitalist patriarchal society. Trafficking epitomises its crime: the domination and exploitation of human and nonhuman animal others. Ecofeminism urges us to reconsider our complicity and embrace the vision of an interspecies community rooted in the motherly ethics of care. When confronted with a trafficked dog and female child, respectively, the tough Jackson and Tracy wish to transform into the maternal investigator of ecofeminist revision and create a caring (interspecies) family. But behind their maternal appearances lurks the noir perpetrator who mirrors his or her society's crimes. I argue that Atkinson uses the noir convention of the hard-boiled investigator shifting between identities – here borrowed from a sub-generic variant – to explore ordinary men and women's entrapment in contemporary society in the conflict between complicity and care. Through manipulation of point of view, we the readers are in fact implicated in this conflict as well.
Journal
Crime Fiction Studies – Edinburgh University Press
Published: Sep 1, 2021