Genders : in a new configuration of hard-boiled fiction: Lousie Welsh’s (2002) the cutting room

Abstract

Crime fiction has been a significant vehicle to expose the preoccupations and anxieties of Western societies since its initial development in the early 19th century. Especially one sub-generic category of crime fiction, hard-boiled fiction, is considered responsive to society due to its aim to address emerging issues, such as race and gender nowadays, explicitly. The cutting room (Welsh, 2002) not only plays with hard-boiled traditions but also displays new appropriations of the form. In this work, I focus on the relation between the specific concern with genders and the development of this crime fiction sub-genre. As a result, and following Butler’s (1990) approach to genders, I provide new insights into how the understanding of gender as the representation of two fixed categories, male and female, has changed towards plural categories. In view of those results, I sought to confirm my hypothesis that the representations of gender present in the novel disrupt the conventions of hard-boiled fiction but do so only up to a certain extent. I hope that the findings of this work could be useful for further understanding of the new configurations in hard-boiled fiction.