***apologies for cross-posting*** CFP: Bombshells and Brunettes: The Postwar Hollywood Sex Symbol Panel Proposal to Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2010 Conference, Los Angeles, CA We are currently seeking participants for the following proposed panel presentation. Please send a 300-350 word abstract and your full contact information to Rebecca Sullivan via e-mail, [log in to unmask] no later than August 15th. ********** Postwar Hollywood cinema is marked not only by a greater explicitness in the depiction of sex but also greater dramatic significance to the subject. With the weakening of both the Production Code Office and the Legion of Decency, the importation of starkly realist European films, and the rise of independent and underground cinema, the strict containment of sexual representation began to crack. These transformation in popular cinema were clearly influenced by the volatility of American society. Movements such as civil rights, the sexual revolution, and second wave feminism, alongside sweeping liberal reforms to the social infrastructure of daily life led to a rethinking of key American values such as personal liberty and the rights of the individual. Sex was a key marker of authenticity and self-awareness, incorporating a complex set of knowledges ranging from Freudian psychoanalysis to sexology to liberal policies on sex education. The sex symbol a mainstay of the Hollywood star industry now tended to highlight internal rather than external conflicts, and psychological introspection on personal morality (Wexman 1993). At the same time, there lurked in these sexual debates an undeniable eugenical impulse that linked sexual desire to race and ethnicity, connected to both liberal arguments for the African American as the quintessentially authentic modern subject (see Mailer 1957) and cosmopolitan notions of foreign exoticness (Wilinsky 2001). As Richard Dyer (1997) argues in his seminal work, White, it is difficult to unmoor race from sex, as both are ultimately about embodied identity and reproductivity. Thus, sex has been cast as ³dark desires² emanating from primal instincts rather than civilized codes of bourgeois society. In the context of postwar American popular cinema, sex was depicted as a celebration of the id and a foregrounding of the individual over the pressures of social conformity and group think but only so far. The intertwining of race, ethnicity and sex in popular cinema resulted in deeply problematic systems of representation, manifest in postwar Hollywood sex symbols. They forwarded a far franker sexuality that challenged existing morés and values about more than just carnal knowledge. At stake was the redefinition of the modern American individual according to new systems of race relations, immigration and internationalism, class distinction, family and the individual. We invite proposals that reflect these broader concerns, including in the areas of: * European stars and the exotic * Whiteness and the bombshell body * Race and the hyper-sexed body * Authenticity and sexuality * Masculinity and new archetypes of male sexuality * Women¹s sexuality and feminine containment Panel convenors: Hilaria Loyo Facultad de Filosofía y Letras Universidad de Zaragoza [log in to unmask] Dr. Rebecca Sullivan Faculty of Communication and Culture The University of Calgary [log in to unmask] ---- Learn to speak like a film/TV professor! Listen to the ScreenLex podcast: http://www.screenlex.org