ABSTRACT
An Earth Mother is a goddess of both women and men, just as the planet nurtures and produces both, or all, possible genders. By contrast, a Sky Father takes an active and differentiating role in gender creation. By making nature and the planet as separate from himself, “he” founds duality as a fundamental condition of being. Once that duality is inscribed onto the different bodies of women and men, gender as a set of binary alternatives begins. The chapter looks at how genre operates dynamically for the goddesses, from trickster myth to divine vehicle. Male hardboiled mysteries are no longer balanced against the female clue-puzzle, or “cozy,” as the genre celebrates its own polytheistic liberation. By the twenty-first century, sleuth fiction by women in the United States and Britain disrupts the earlier gendered opposition of hardboiled and cozy, and also dismembers dualism into multiplicity in a self-conscious irony native to this trickster genre.
