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Queer-Diva Collaboration in 20th Century Pop Music

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dc.contributor.advisorLatchford, Frances J.
dc.contributor.authorIannacci, Elio
dc.date.accessioned2023-12-08T14:50:28Z
dc.date.available2023-12-08T14:50:28Z
dc.date.issued2023-12-08
dc.date.updated2023-12-08T14:50:27Z
dc.degree.disciplineInterdisciplinary Studies
dc.degree.levelMaster's
dc.degree.nameMA - Master of Arts
dc.description.abstractThis thesis explores the practice of “Queer-Diva collaboration” as it pertains to the work of pop music icons Grace Jones and Annie Lennox. Queer-Diva collaborations are a surprisingly common yet undertheorized artistic phenomena wherein female pop singers co-create music and art with members of the LGBTQ community. My study argues that through these collaborations, queer counterculture discourses critique and reform mainstream popular culture. While much scholarship revolves around the Diva and her Queer audience, this thesis draws on theories of artistic collaboration as “utopian modernist sites” (Green 175), forms of “gender collapse” (Butler 41, 121) and testaments to “Queer world-making” (Muñoz 22) in order to recover the Diva’s crucial relationship with LGBTQ art directors, stylists, choreographers and music producers. This study historicises and analyses two pivotal Queer-Diva collaborations as case studies, both of which reflect and broadcast the repercussions of watershed moments in LGBTQ politics. The first case study examines Grace Jones’s music video to 1986’s “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You),” directed by Jones and Queer graffiti artist Keith Haring which fuses Jones’s racial and gender pluralism with Haring’s HIV/AIDS activism. The second case study analyses Annie Lennox’s and DJ Junior Vasquez’s “No More ‘I Love You’s’” (The Sound Factory Mix), a recording released in 1995, which embodies a proliferating era of LGBTQ civil rights and an aural armament against misogynistic and homophobic oppression. Focusing on these distinctive epochs within Jones’s and Lennox’s oeuvres, this thesis examines the effects, repercussions and implications of these Queer-Diva collaborations and determines how they disrupt anti-Black, anti-Queer and heterosexist discourses.
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/41787
dc.languageen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectGLBT studies
dc.subjectMusic
dc.subjectHistory
dc.subject.keywordsLGBTQ history
dc.subject.keywordsMusic history
dc.subject.keywordsArt collaboration
dc.subject.keywordsQueer
dc.subject.keywordsGender
dc.subject.keywordsFeminism
dc.subject.keywordsPop music
dc.subject.keywordsFashion studies
dc.subject.keywordsStyling
dc.subject.keywordsVisual art
dc.subject.keywordsTechnology
dc.subject.keywordsGrace Jones
dc.subject.keywordsAnnie Lennox
dc.subject.keywordsDiva
dc.subject.keywordsKeith Haring
dc.subject.keywordsJunior Vasquez
dc.subject.keywordsDJ studies
dc.subject.keywordsDiva studies
dc.subject.keywordsDance music
dc.subject.keywordsPolitics
dc.subject.keywordsCivil rights
dc.subject.keywordsEthnomusicology
dc.subject.keywordsMusicology
dc.titleQueer-Diva Collaboration in 20th Century Pop Music
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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