I had the great honor of chatting with the crime fiction scholar (and CrimeReads contributor) Caroline Reitz about her new book, Female Anger in Crime Fiction on the podcast Indoor Voices, hosted by Kathleen Collins and put out by CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
We cover tons of topics all related to themes of feminism, justice, anger, contemporary politics and media, the role of entertainment in society… here’s the summary here.
“Dr. Caroline Reitz is an associate professor of English at John Jay and the Graduate Center and the author of Female Anger in Crime Fiction published by Cambridge University Press in the Elements in Crime Narratives series. She is in conversation in this episode with Dr. Olivia Rutigliano, a writer, film critic, and editor at Literary Hub and Crime Reads. Together they take on the female anger ecocsystem, particularly the way anger is portrayed in popular culture, the role that anger plays, and its potential and its limits. They ask where justice fits into the narratives of, for example, the streaming series Killing Eve, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Bad Sisters and in the novel My Sister, the Serial Killer. They ask what pop culture’s role is in bringing the causes and outcomes of anger to the fore and if these representations can be educational and empowering. They address trad wives, female assassins and the chicken and egg conundrum of madness and anger. They reference bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Malcolm X, Sara Paretsky, Patricia Melo, George Orwell, Victorian studies, and all the waves of feminism. They reminisce about the olden times when ultra rich megalomaniacs used to be philanthropic and at least ostensibly concerned about humanity. They weave in the importance of baby goats and recycling your tuna cans, and Caroline comes up with a crime plot on the spot. This conversation will fire you up in good ways and, well, that’s one of the questions asked here, and not rhetorically – what use is getting fired up?”
Listen here:
