Cuando el negro se vuelve violeta: presencia y efectos del lesbianismo en tres novelas sobre el feminicidio en Ciudad Juárez

Abstract

Lesbian women writers have massively invested the genre of the detective novel during the last decades. How can this situation be explained? This article provides some answers based on three noir novels that share a common theme (feminicide in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico) and the presence of lesbian “detectives”. The corpus includes Sangre en el desierto by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, He visto al diablo de frente by Maud Tabachnik, and Ciudad final by Josebe Martínez. Starting from the most common characteristics of the detective novel – socio-political reflection, the marginality of the investigator, sexism and realism – this study shows that, beyond the denunciation of the horror of women’s murders and a desire to subvert a genre often wrongly perceived as “masculine”, the noir novel may seem to lesbian writers as the ideal narrative medium for expressing their lives, i.e., their social condition, their culture, their loves and their demands.