Abstract
This dissertation examines the institutional and cultural history of the Motion Picture Production Code (1930-1967) and the role of pre-Code era of Hollywood (1927-1934) in defining “miscegenation” and reifying its taboo for modern Americans. Narratives and imagery of miscegenation and interracialism are present from the earliest days of film, and were one of the first things to be censored by the film industry’s self-censorship apparatus within the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America in the 1920s. In banning miscegenation from films mostly for the Southern markets, censors stepped into a national cultural debate around the legality, morality, and importance of restricting interracial intimacy and marriage. During the formative period of the pre-Code, between 1927 and 1934, the miscegenation ban’s piecemeal enforcement reflected a process of negotiation that expanded the definition of miscegenation from exclusively White/Black pairings to include depictions of White/Asian interracial intimacy. This period also solidified the narrative convention, structured by the demands of the Code, of the movie miscegenation drama. This narrative convention was widely applied to all depictions of interracial intimacy, including White/Polynesian and White/American Indian pairings which were not widely considered miscegenetic within the United States at the time. The movie miscegenation drama thus portrayed all interracial intimacy as taboo and dangerous, flattening the complexities of American attitudes towards diverse relationships. By combining analyses of films, censorship, industry publications, and audience responses, I show the wide-ranging impact of the pre-Code period and industry self-censorship in developing the movie miscegenation drama and refining the normative boundaries of race and gender for national audiences.