In Adam's Rib, Adam Bonner claims that he prefers ‘two sexes’. Much of the film explores male anxieties about empowered women and the concept of equality between the sexes. Yet, as the voice performances of both Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in this film continuously intimate, the notion of biologically determined behaviours that are socially assigned to each sex seems an almost impossible – and outdated – view of gender. My exploration of these representations in this book has furthermore revealed that the blurring of boundaries between masculine and feminine behaviours – or, rather, performances thereof – is a liberating experience for men and women. Moreover, this sense of gender subversion offers a pleasurable and wide spectrum of meaning-generative audio, visual and narrative experiences for film audiences.

While working on this book, I have encountered diverse aural representations of masculinity and femininity. These were centred by and focalised through their production and distribution context: mainstream (mostly Hollywood) American genre films. In discussing sound in relation to genre, we can perhaps consider this selection of films in terms of their ‘dominant soundscapes’ and now begin to reflect on the ways in which film sound genre conventions might have changed or evolved in each case study. Since this study takes a socio-historic approach, these changes can be linked to developments taking place in American society and might furthermore indicate how or why they might have influenced the evolution of other genres.

The dominant soundscape of screwball comedy is constructed around vocal performance, mainly consisting of fast-paced speech, with limited music or sound effects, as witnessed throughout It Happened One Night. Yet in later incarnations of the genre, we see more fluctuations in female vocal performance, as witnessed from Hildy in His Girl Friday, musical performance from Susan and David in Bringing Up Baby, as well as a chorus of loud sound effects such as the dog barking and leopard growling. These examples demonstrate how changes in sound conventions intensify the fast-paced, madcap essence for which the genre is infamous.