Diana Mankowski, "Gender and Disco: Exploring the Intersection of Sexual Revolution, Women's Liberation, and Popular Culture in 1970s America"

While often viewed as a time of malaise and insignificant decadence after the fiery movements for social and political change of the 1960s, the 1970s in America were actually a time when these movements continued evolving and influencing society in myriad ways. They were a particularly potent time for feminism and sexual liberation as both "movements"—sexual revolution and second wave feminism—became increasingly fragmented and splintered throughout the course of the decade. As women debated the best ways of gaining equal rights and liberation, as people developed unique ideas of what sexual freedom meant, and as notions of liberation seeped further into the lifestyle of "middle America," sex became a commodity that saturated American popular culture, especially prevalent in the form of disco music. But with roots in an underground scene of house parties and exclusive clubs where New York City's gay and minority communities celebrated marginality, the historiography of disco is one that offers a narrative of technical achievements, pioneering DJs, and club culture that was significant and subversive only among this original membership. The limited analysis of popular disco performers and of the cultural implications of the music, image, and experience of disco for a larger, mainstream audience leaves the field open to questions.

The massive mainstream popularity of disco music and culture in the late 1970s is exactly what makes the phenomenon so important in American history and that because of its widespread popularity and continued link to sexual freedom, disco can teach us something significant about ideas of gender and sexuality just after the height of women's liberation and sexual revolution. "Gender and Disco" seeks to use a large-scale cultural phenomenon as a lens through which to understand the residual influence of these movements as they infiltrated mainstream sensibilities and to explore the dynamic between sexuality and feminism, a relatively neglected area of study. By doing so, I hope to show the ways in which a political movement such as second wave feminism can influence cultural ideas and, in turn, make culture political.

Preliminary work on disco diva Donna Summer suggests that disco allowed for an expression of female sexuality that was more explicit and active than that which had come before, but one that simultaneously objectified women for the pleasure of men. The tension between disco divas/dancers as simultaneous sexual subjects and objects will be central to my dissertation. Because the large majority of disco performers were African American women who recorded for a broad audience, disco also offers an opportunity to explore tensions among sexual ideas and identities of varying racial groups, especially as the movements of the 1960s became fractured by the end of the 1970s and the idea of multicultural feminism(s) that served the unique purposes of different groups or individual subjectivities began to hold sway. My dissertation hopes to tackle issues of how the performance and experience of disco music gave agency and voice to women of color, how the appropriation of an originally black musical sound by a mainstream white audience might have limited that agency while at the same time allowing white women to redefined their own sexuality through their participation in disco culture, and how these varied expressions worked together to create a model of sexuality that was highly complex and radically individual by the early 1980s.

While the focus of my project will be on women and heterosexual expression, the widespread popularity of disco, in addition to its roots in homosexual culture and strong fan base of gay men even as it went mainstream, cannot rule out an analysis of both masculinity and homosexuality. By looking at coverage of and responses to disco in newspapers and magazines, both industry- and fan-oriented as well as more widely circulated publications, and the mass marketed products of the disco craze, I will investigate the ways in which the representation and experience of disco threatened and reshaped dominant modes of masculinity while opening avenues for the demonstration and (limited) acceptance of camp, of gay pleasure and style.

It was this opening of new avenues—of public female sexual expression, of new concepts of masculinity, of camp—that, combined with over saturation in the marketplace, helped launch a backlash to the disco craze almost simultaneous with its peak years in American culture. Correlating with a backlash to feminism and the rise of conservatism in larger American culture and politics, the downfall of disco spelled a continued redefinition of gender and sexuality in the American mindset. But just as disco influenced and shaped musical forms in its wake, so did its ideas of female and sexual liberation continue to shape musical expression in later decades. By exploring gender and sexuality through a widely popular cultural form, my dissertation will contribute to the current understanding of gender in late-twentieth-century America and will underscore the intersection of culture with social and political movements for change.