Female Academic Detectives
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eral convictions, communal connections are important for her both personally and
professionally. Her immediate circle of friends is a mixed group of men and women,
consisting of her best friend Jill, her Italian ex-boyfriend Dante and his roommate,
her sixty-something landlady, and the police officer Nikki sets her up with. This
group often meets informally for breakfast and late night tea, joking, teasing, flirt
ing, and debating politics and the crimes Nikki helps solve. Nikki is also a part of
the Harvard academic/faculty/economics communities, each of which she works
for but also examines from a healthy critical distance. And in the course of her
investigations, her wider communal goals and connections become apparent: in
both mysteries, she investigates the relations between Ivy League schools and their
surrounding communities, complex political debates within academic and Afri
can-American communities, and the intersections between race, class, and gender
both within and outside academia. In the process of exploring the politics of inter
racial relationships, embezzlement schemes, academic racism, entrenched WASP
privileges, opportunism, and the many conflicts and alliances between student lead
ers, community groups, colleagues, friends, and competitors, Nikki often finds
herself both disagreeing and agreeing with different conflicting groups. Her com
mitment is primarily to African-American communities, but she cannot always
agree with the more passionate and one-sided perspectives she comes across. In
Blue Blood, although she has little respect for the blond right wing murder victim,
she is also deeply disturbed by the violent sexual nature of the attack. Both her
sympathy for the victim and her concern for the black football player falsely ar
rested for the crime, motivate her search for justice.
Without coming across as superhuman, the female detective scholars I have
discussed seem to have found a way to bridge the gaps between academia and
everyday life: the personal, professional, and political; individualism and commu
nity. They largely manage to do so via feminism - fighting for women’s causes in
both their academic and their detective roles, in both their academic and local
communities. Without putting their interests first, but also without acquiescing
only to the powers that be, these sleuths challenge traditional academic, female,
and detective stereotypes. Their work combines theory and practice, the commu
nal and the individual - and contests the notion that these traditional opposites
have to be at odds with one another. These heroines are neither outlaw nor official
heroes, but they do give us a characteristically female or feminist taste of both.
Wayne State College
Katja Hawlitschka