From Mobile Crimes to Crimes of Mobility

Piipponen, Mäntymäki and Rodi-Risberg suggest that many contemporary crime narratives across the globe host a heightened interest in diverse and ambiguous mobilities, border crossings and borderlands. They propose that such mobilities and crossings reflect on recent sociocultural developments on local and global levels and communicate specific geopolitical anxieties. They position their own mobilities research perspective within existing crime fiction scholarship, especially within the so-called transnational and spatial turns. Introducing some key observations of mobilities research, they suggest that mobility can be considered both as an object of study in its own right and a critical len…

Perpetrator Trauma in Television Crime Series We Hunt Together

Crime fiction scholarship increasingly focuses on trauma in contemporary crime narratives but has largely neglected to investigate perpetrator trauma. This article contributes to filling this gap by exploring perpetrator trauma in We Hunt Together (2020), a British television crime series written by Gaby Hull, that portrays the consequences of perpetrator trauma on a former child soldier from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Babeni (Baba) Lenga, waiting for permanent residency in the UK. Viewers learn about his violent past through flashbacks and his involvement with Frederica ‘Freddy’ Lane which precipitates Baba’s present return to violence. Informed by crime fiction studies, l…

From victims to survivors : The discourse of trauma in self-narratives of sexual violence in Cosmopolitan UK online

Trauma and storytelling in Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon

The dominant understanding of trauma as an epistemological crisis that can be mimetically passed on to readers has in the twenty-first century been criticized for its apolitical and ahistorical ori...

Sophie Hannah’s Hurting Distance as Crime Trauma Fiction

Rodi-Risberg addresses trauma’s generic border-crossing movement through Sophie Hannah’s socially conscious crime thriller Hurting Distance (2007), a trauma narrative of sexual violence and emotional abuse that can be referred to as crime trauma fiction because it incorporates and blends features of both genres. Rodi-Risberg’s main argument is that crime trauma fiction such as Hannah’s novel represents traumatic experience as politically significant by mobilising affect through its themes of violence as social critique. The chapter concludes that contemporary narratives of crime and trauma such as Hannah’s should be seen as an important locus not only for representing traumatic experience, …

Trauma and storytelling in Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon

The dominant understanding of trauma as an epistemological crisis that can be mimetically passed on to readers has in the twenty-first century been criticized for its apolitical and ahistorical orientations. As a way to assess this criticism, this article examines trauma and storytelling in Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon (1994), a novel which places the trauma of sexual violence in a broader context of settler colonialism. Reading the novel in dialog with American Indian studies and research on the writings of women of color offers an exploration of key aspects of trauma theory, such as the notions of unrepresentability, punctuality, transmissibility, belatedness, and passive witness…

Problems in Representing Trauma

El Capitan as a Site for Male Healing from Trauma in Jeff Long’s The Wall and Tommy Caldwell’s The Push

Nature and mountains are often represented as places of healing in literature and the media, especially for white, healthy, and middleclass men. However, discussions on nature and gender in relation to trauma are rare, and a specific discussion on the representation of male mountain climbers’ traumas is missing. In this article, we are interested in how nature, particularly the famous mountain El Capitan, is represented in Jeff Long’s novel “The Wall” (2006) and Tommy Caldwell’s memoir “The Push” (2017) as a specific spatial location of healing for male rock climbers, who at the same time are both victims of traumatic events and partially responsible for the development of those events. Mor…