The Girl on the Stairs de Louise Welsh: Conformando una nueva detective, deconstruyendo discursos normativos de género.

Abstract

Louise Welsh’s novel The Girl on the Stairs (2012) is representative of a recent tendency in the context of crime fiction which engages readers to question preconceptions of gender and sexuality in a very effective manner that makes it also subversive with regard to the masculine tradition of the genre. Thus, this article focuses on two aspects of the novel: the construction of the female detective and the implicit invalidation of narratives of feminine vulnerability and discourses of fear in the urban environment. This focus allows us to analyse how the complicity of the readers for the questioning of normative gender discourses is achieved and how a parallelism can therefore be established between the subversion the novel implies in the tradition of the genre and the role of the novel as an instrument for social change beyond the boundaries of the literary context.