Cultural Materialism in the Production and Distribution of Exploitative Lesbian Film: A Historical Case Study of Children of Loneliness (1935)

Anna Fåhraeus

doi:10.35360/njes.618

Abstract

Raymond Williams developed a vocabulary and framework for analyzing the ideological forces at work in literature and art, as objects, but also in terms of their production and distribution. This article looks back at his elaboration of cultural materialism and its relationship to film in Preface to Film (1954), written with Michael Orrin, as a way of understanding the media traces of the lost film Children of Loneliness (dir. Richard C. Kahn). The film was an early sex education about homosexuality and this article explores its connections to early exploitation films as a cinematic form, and the dominant and emergent discourses that were used to promote it, as a well as at structures of feeling that these discourses reflect.

Highlights

Raymond Williams laid much of the groundwork for cultural studies and media studies with his work Culture and Society (1958), Communications (1962) and Television (1974)
Concluding Discussion As Raymond Williams stated in a 1960s BBC radio talk, ‘the great new movements begin in popular interests; that they are carried through by new kinds of arts, from outside the traditionally cultivated class’ (2013: 20)
Jewell Productions had produced a new kind of film about a new, taboo topic

Summary

Introduction

Raymond Williams laid much of the groundwork for cultural studies and media studies with his work Culture and Society (1958), Communications (1962) and Television (1974). In contrast to the major studio links that appear when researching ownership in the 1930s, the theatres that screened Children of Loneliness in the 1950s were owned by independent entrepreneurs, who were not concerned about the Hays Code Even though it was billed as an adultsonly film, the screening in Salt Lake City in 1953 took place outdoors at the Airport Drive-In around dinnertime. Ratings and Time Slots The advertised rating and the time of day for a movie screening point to specific social norms linked to material conditions that can reproduce and disrupt the social order in a community In this case, the cultural context is the historically dominant discourse on homosexuality as abnormal and as socially taboo, and the desire to suppress gay visibility as the official position of the MPAA. The attempt to stop The Well of Loneliness from being imported to the United States and the

Fashioning Sapphism

Hermaphroditism