Deadline for submissions: November 21, 2016
Full name / name of organization: ALA Symposium–Criminal America: Reading, Studying and Teaching American Crime Fiction
Contact email: lpennywa@purdue.edu
The hard-boiled in crime and detective fiction is frequently associated with a nostalgia for an imagined white, working-class, American masculinity. Yet, women writers and characters also address the hard-boiled, often in order to modify, critique, or resituate it within cultural frameworks.
This panel invites papers that explore how women writers and characters disrupt dominant understandings of the hard-boiled in US crime and detective fiction. What does hard-boiled femininity look like? Under what circumstances is it possible? What strategies do women writers use when writing within the genre of hard-boiled fiction? How does hard-boiled femininity intersect with or challenge popular representations of race and class within crime and detective narratives?
Please send 300 word abstracts by November 21, 2016 to lpennywa@purdue.edu.