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"Not One of the Lads": Antoinette Conway as Outsider in Tana French's "The Trespasser"

Tana French's detective Antoinette Conway first appears as a secondary character in The Secret Place (2014), but in French's sixth and latest novel The Trespasser (2016) she takes over the role of first-person narrator. As the only woman and person of color in the Dublin Murder Squad, an elite and extremely competitive police unit, Antoinette is isolated, bullied, and finally forced to endure and accept her outsider status because "some of the guys figure that's the natural order". As Antoinette refuses to tolerate their sexist and racist behavior, ranging from inappropriate jokes to sexual harassment, she is the one that is regarded as temperamental and aggressive ; she becomes the problem. Antoinette deliberately accentuates features others think she should hide – primarily her gender and her race – and in this way comes to embody the figures of "feminist killjoy", "angry black woman", and "melancholic migrant", which Sara Ahmed describes in her influential book The Promise of Happiness (2010). Embracing the role of "feminist killjoy" reinforces Antoinette's outsider status, but at the same time makes her the only detective capable of solving a complex case involving a colleague and, as a consequence, exposing the structural sexism and racism of the Dublin Murder Squad.

outsider ; crime fiction ; gender ; race ; feminist killjoy ; angry black woman

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