Gentlemen Prefer Adaptations: Addressing Industry and Gender in Adaptation Studies

Adaptation studies’ dominant mode has tended to focus on textual analysis. Such an approach neglects the processes of production, a lacuna that works to mask underlying systems of industry and capital. The absence of attention to industry has resulted in an occluding of the ways in which gender in for-profit entertainment has been represented and shaped. This essay intervenes in adaptation and gender studies through a detailed historical analysis of the interrelationships of industries affecting 1920s print, stage, and film versions of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Through this analysis, the essay demonstrates the efficacy of a more broadly configured form of adaptation in examining the interrelated industrial complex affecting representations of gender in commercial entertainment. It explores individual interventions in the process of constructing gender in adaptations.