MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In 1950s film blondeness became equated with whiteness and blondes in film signaled the height of feminine performance. Many blonde archetypes abounded in this period, from the girl next door to sex symbols to wise-cracking dames, including of course Marilyn Monroe’s positioning as the most iconic symbol of blonde femininity in the period. Transcending genre, blondes in the 1950s were all the rage. Like the ubiquitous “Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” blondeness invited a duplicity that facilitated blurring the line between gender performance and authentic identity. In Hollywood there was little faith in the idea of a “natural” blonde. Platinum blondes in postwar films became the most recognizably constructed signs of racial and gender identity in the 1950s. Blondeness was a manufactured commodity that could be packaged and sold in a bottle as a lifestyle choice; a feminine ideal anyone could buy. Everyone was passing as blonde, subverting notions of authentic white identity. Blonde afforded women another mask for racial and ethnic passing that existed outside class distinctions as the desired representation of a sexualized feminine beauty. Blondeness was intimately connected to the performance of whiteness. Blonde beauty was hyped as attainable precisely because it was artificial. Actresses like Judy Holliday and Marilyn Monroe epitomized the successfully constructed blonde persona, but blondeness as desired ideal was a gender performance that invited racial transgressions. This paper will explore how fixed ideals of gender and race were utilized and subverted both on and off screen in films that played with iconic blonde performances like She Devil (1957), Born Yesterday (1950), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (1955), and The Three Faces of Eve (1957).