Abstract

This dissertation involves a detailed examination of selected formations of adult entertainment culture between 1948 and 1962. While much research has focused on the emergence of youth or teen culture after the Second World War, the contemporaneous development of distinct and distinctive adult cultural formations in the fields of popular music and Hollywood cinema has been neglected. The dissertation presents an extensive amount of archival and artefactual research as part of a reconstruction of the dominant institutions, forms, and practices of adult popular music and cinema. It examines the inter-articulation of age, gender and taste across a range of media forms, performers, and technologies associated with adult audiences. The dissertation includes detailed accounts of the installation of high-fidelity audio technology in domestic space and of the cross-media career of the singer and actor Frank Sinatra. These studies involve conjunctural analyses of articulations of adultness during a period which is historically associated with the emergence of youth or teen culture. The development of age-segmented popular cultural formations is seen to be implicated in the rise of new modes of appreciation and valourization of popular forms and performers, and these are seen to operate within gendered conceptions of cultural legitimacy.