Private (Brown) Eyes: Ethnicity, Genre and Gender in Crime Fiction in the Gloria Damasco novels and the Chicanos Comic Series

The representation of women in crime fiction has traditionally been a complicated one. Consistently forced into secondary characters (assistants, girlfriends, or damsels in distress) the most active role a female character could aspire to was that of the femme fatale, a pit of perdition, an unwelcome distraction for a man looking for truth and justice. This traditional approach to the genre has been challenged in the last decades by women acting as detectives, trusted with solving their cases in a hostile male world. Similarly, the traditional white male protagonist has been contested by fictions where ethnic minorities are not just consigned to the criminal world, but where detectives are members of ethnic groups, and can use their knowledge of the community to solve the case. This essay focuses on the crossroads of ethnic and women’s detective fiction, specifically the Gloria Damasco series by Chicana writer Lucha Corpi and the graphic novel Chicanos (Trillo and Risso, 1996). Both protagonists (Gloria Damasco, a Chicana clairvoyant detective, and “poor, ugly, and a detective” Alejandrina Yolanda Jalisco) must face both the dangers of investigating criminal cases and discrimination in their professional surroundings due to their gender and ethnicity. By contrasting these texts, the essay elucidates the importance of specific cultural products, their connection to (and defiance of) canonical forms of the genre, and their rejection of generic and gender expectations.

An analysis of authorship attribution: Identifying linguistic variables in oral and written discourse

This dissertation goes into the new field from applied linguistics called forensic linguistics, which studies the language as an evidence for criminal cases. There are many subfields within forensic linguistics, however, this study belongs to authorship attribution analysis, where the authorship of a text is attributed to an author through an exhaustive linguistic analysis. Within this field, this study analyzes the morphosyntactic and discursive-pragmatic variables that remain constant in the intra-variation or personal style of a speaker in the oral and written discourse, and at the same time have a high difference rate in the interspeaker variation, or from one speaker to another. The theoretical base of this study is the term used by professor Maria Teresa Turell called “idiolectal style”. This term establishes that the idiosyncratic choices that the speaker makes from the language build a style for each speaker that is constant in the intravariation of the speaker’s discourse. This study comes as a consequence of the problem appeared in authorship attribution analysis, where the absence of some known texts impedes the analysis for the attribution of the authorship of an uknown text. Thus, through a methodology based on qualitative analysis, where the variables are studied exhaustively, and on quantitative analysis, where the findings from qualitative analysis are statistically studied, some conclusions on the evidence of such variables in both oral and written discourses will be drawn. The results of this analysis will lead to further implications on deeper analyses where larger amount of data can be used.