Meanwhile, Butler's writing on gender performativity allows Smith to interpret the masquerades typical of hard-boiled fiction politically, demonstrating that racial and gender categories are not innate, but enacted.

Certeau's theses on creative reading allow her to propose a greater interpretive latitude on the part of the texts' working-class consumers and a degree of influence on the content of the texts themselves: pulp writers, she argues, had to satisfy the demands of readers, meaning that the texts represent working-class concerns better than Jameson supposes. Smith contests Jameson's characterization of pulp fiction as a form which, in Smith's words, 'smooth over the ideological contradictions in the social order 'manage' the Utopian longings readers' for Smith, the relation of cultural consumer to cultural producer is more complex. Three theorists - Fredric Jameson, Michel de Certeau, and Judith Butler - are central to Smith's study. In response to the second, two-fold question, Smith argues that we ought to characterize pulp fiction as proletarian literature because the working classes were its primary audience, and thus they significantly influenced its content as to pulp fiction's political utility, Smith registers its conservative tendencies but argues that in spite of its obvious misogyny, homophobia, and racism, its emphasis on masquerade nevertheless undermines the stability of gender and racial categories, affording pulp fiction 'a great deal of transgressive potential.' If on this last front particularly Smith only partly persuades, that she poses these questions at all makes Hard-Boiled a valuable contribution to the study of American literature between the wars.

What can hard-boiled fiction of the 1930s and 1940s tell us about its first audiences? Moreover, what case can be made for hard-boiled fiction as politically useful proletarian literature? In response to the first question, Erin Smith argues that such literature and the magazines in which it circulated are rich social documents revealing mid-century working-class anxiety about proletarianization and the erosion of white male cultural privilege. Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines.

Hard-Boiled by Erin A. Smith