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

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.