Dr. DAVIES Ffion Mary Rose2025-09-052025-09-052019Davies, F. M. R. (13 Jun 2019). Hard-boiled femininity in contemporary crime fiction. Captivating Criminality 6, D’Annunzio University of Chieti Pescara, Italy.http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11861/24994The hard-boiled is a genre associated with pulp fiction of the twenties, and has been described, albeit rather reductively, as ‘books about tough guys’. Pioneered in novel-form by Raymond Chandler, many critics argue that the hard-boiled is ‘inflected with a particular straight, white, male way of seeing’. It is true that ‘western pop culture… continue to celebrate the ‘he-man’’, however, ‘certainly since the 1970s there has been a strong hint of parody, even dysfunction, in the portrayal’. It is said that ‘genre fiction articulates cultural conflicts’, therefore, it is no surprise that the Eighties, a decade heavily concerned with issues of gender, saw a spike in the introduction of female leads and detectives in hard-boiled crime fiction. The female sleuth, such as Paretsky’s “Vic” Warshawski and Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, dominated the pages of crime fiction best sellers, and it seemed as though ‘After generations of peeking through their knitting and over their pots and pans, the new female sleuths are more intellectually vital [and] more physically capable.’ What is the function of the female hard-boiled detective in a genre which is considered ‘traditionally masculinist’. What happens when a genre which is usually the ‘preserve of straight, white, male writers’ is appropriated by women? This paper seeks to examine the ways in which contemporary crime fiction has appropriated the hard-boiled aesthetic; repackaging and reinventing it as an oppositional ‘hard-boiled’ femininity in order to explore social and cultural issues of its day.enConference Paper