Gendering the Disco Inferno: Sexual Revolution, Liberation, and Popular Culture in 1970s America.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the multiple and varied representations of gender and sexuality in the mainstream disco craze of the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. It argues that disco became popular as cultural expression of gender and sexual uncertainty and redefinition as American society came to terms with the changes and tensions of an era of intense and fragmenting social movements including sexual revolution, feminism, gay liberation, Black Power, and human potential. Analyzing disco as a mass-marketed culture that included dancing, fashion, movies, and music, I show how disco incorporated a wide spectrum of gender and sexual possibility that upset conventional boundaries and how popular culture served as a forum for individuals grappling with social movements and changes outside of avowedly political activity and inside a highly commercialized and increasingly sexualized culture. Disco offered women an erotically charged, assertive expression of sexuality influenced by the contentious relationship between feminism and sexual freedom. Participants navigated a tricky path between sexual subjecthood and objecthood, between defining one’s own sexuality while avoiding sexual exploitation. Disco’s cultural influence also threatened and reshaped dominant modes of masculinity, representing a conflicted and uncertain response to the demands of feminism that challenged and redefined masculine ideals for both whites and blacks while opening avenues for the demonstration and (limited) acceptance of gay pleasure and style.

Highlighting gender and sexuality in disco’s mainstream story also pushes past the standard declension narrative of disco drifting into mindless and formulaic commercialism to see instead the ways in which its mainstream expression held significant meaning and positive potential in shaping the identities and subjectivities of various groups. Most of the scholarship on disco tends to glorify the subversive potential of its underground form among gays and minority groups or uses mainstream disco products only to explore their meanings for homosexuals or to explain the disco backlash. This dissertation, by contrast, emphasizes disco’s broad popularity as representative of larger social and cultural trends of the era, arguing that mainstream disco can tell us much about the whole of American gender and sexual culture in that moment of confusion.