Roundtable: Sex and the Hollywood Production Code [25/26 seminar series]

Roundtable: Sex and the Hollywood Production Code

Monday 14th July 2025 / 6-7pm UK TIME

We are pleased to share details about our next event in the Screening Sex seminar series. Registration is now open for the July seminar and you can request a notification when registration opens for the subsequent events.

Celebrating the recent special issue of Quarterly Review of Film and Video,
“Hollywood Film Style and the Production Code: Criticism and History,” Screening
Sex will be joined by the guest editor and three contributors to reevaluate what was
screened during Code-era Hollywood, considering the complexities of what was
shown onscreen and what was veiled from view. Guest editor Dr Tom Brown and
contributors Dr Kathrina Glitre, Dr Martha Shearer and Dr Adam Vaughan will discuss
what Hollywood could show and/or infer of human sexuality during the era of self-
regulation, administered by such figures as William Hays and Joseph Breen primarily
between the 1930s and 1950s.

Speaker bios

Tom Brown is Senior Lecturer at King’s College London, UK. He is the author of
Spectacle in “Classical” Cinemas: Musicality and Historicity in the 1930s (Routledge,
2016). Tom’s work is strongly invested in the category of the “classical” and the
relationship between traditions of close textual analysis, classical film theory and film
history. He is currently working on a project contracted to SUNY Press, provisionally
titled Pixar and the Classical Tradition: Style, Story and Industry.

Kathrina Glitre is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of the West of
England , UK. She is an editor of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, and the author
of Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934-1965 (Manchester UP,
2006).

Martha Shearer is Associate Professor in Film Studies at University College Dublin,
IE. She is the author of New York City and the Hollywood Musical: Dancing in the
Streets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and co-editor of Musicals at the Margins: Genre,
Boundaries, Canon (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Women and New Hollywood: Gender,
Creative Labor, and 1970s American Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2023).

Adam Vaughan is Lecturer in Film and Television at Southampton Solent University,
UK. His research interests include the performance of identity in documentary film,
queer cinema and the political implications of personal identity in LGBTQ+ cinema.
He has published on 21st-century European documentary, contemporary American
LGBTQ+ cinema and performativity in documentary film.

Register for “Roundtable: Sex and the Hollywood Production Code” by completing the form below and a Teams link will be emailed to you 24-hours before the event. Attendee questions can be submitted in advance by emailing screeningsex@gmail.com.

If you are not already a member of the Screening Sex network or would like to update your bio on our network page, please submit a network request here.

This event is part of the screening sex 25/26 seminar series

Spring	Summer	Autumn
In Conversation: Screening Sex Collaboratively	Sex and the Hollywood Production Code	Screening Sex in the Classroom: Pedagogical Reflections
Donna Peberdy and Tanya Horeck discuss the valuable role played by formal and informal collaborations in shaping their research about sex on screen	A roundtable discussion of Hollywood and the Production Code following the publication of a special edition of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Tom Brown with Kathrina Glitre, Martha Shearer and Adam Vaughan.	This international and cross-institutional roundtable and forum will explore pedagogical practices and issues relating to teaching sex on screen in Higher Education.
Tuesday 18th March 2025 6pm GMT Teams	Monday 14th July 2025 6pm BST Teams	October 2025 tbc

You can request a notification when registration opens for subsequent events by completing the above form.

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