2024/01/02 by Josephine Browne · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Crime and Detective Fiction Studies #Gothic Literature and Media Analysis #Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology
paper · doi:10.1080/09574042.2024.2316992
openalex publication_date 2024/01/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/13
Concurrent with increasing social and legal discussions of coercive control, literary scholars are turning their attention to analyses of an emergent genre labelled ‘domestic noir’. Adding to earlier work, particularly that of Deborah Philips (2021), ‘Gaslighting: Domestic Noir, the Narratives of Coercive Control’, Women: A Cultural Review 32:2, pp. 140–160 and Meg Vann (2019), ‘Genre and Gender: Reading Domestic Noir through the Lens of Feminist Criminology’, TEXT Special Issue 57, pp. n.p., this paper contributes a therapeutic history of interventions for domestic violence, highlighting the history of the concept of control contextualized by its emergence from second wave feminism. Critical analysis of two novels, Ilsa Evans’ Broken (2007) and Kathryn Heyman’s Storm and Grace (2017), demonstrate writers centralizing feminist critiques of coercive control in domestic noir in the Australian context. This paper highlights the significance of women’s fictional representations of coercive control as sites of discursive sociocultural resistance and temporal political contextualization within the genre.