Listen Without Prejudice: Queer Masculinities in the Popular Music Cultures of Thatcher’s Britain

This thesis brings into academic discourse the first substantial, periodised investigation into the role of British popular music in catalysing a rise in mainstream gay male visibility during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership (1979-1990). I examine how popular music afforded a radical space within this seismic cultural and socio-political context that permitted artists to express, challenge, and remodel expectations of masculinity and male (homo)sexuality, often antithetical to the dominant political ideology. Interrogating the tensions faced by gay individuals within a Thatcherite neoliberal capitalist society, which advocated individual freedom and autonomy whilst simultaneously restricting queer lives, the thesis explores the spectrum of male sexuality and masculinity articulated by specific mainstream musicians, and their subsequent influence on challenging existing attitudes towards queer individuals. During this period, artistic and musical innovation offered a creative sense of catharsis, subversion, and self-expression, which represented and validated a spectrum of queer experiences. As electronic music continued to flourish into new subgenres such as Hi-NRG and house, the musical successors of disco continued its legacy of danceability. The visible presence of the autonomous dancing queer body remains radically symbolic and significant in a historical moment in which queer bodies, specifically those of gay men, were too often discriminately depicted in the context of anxiety and infection. Against this backdrop, this thesis explores the striking prominence of electronic music and synth-pop amid this rise of queerness within popular culture, drawing on the parallels in criticisms of and scholarship surrounding the bricolage, constructed nature of both queerness and synth-pop. Taking an interdisciplinary and chronological approach, I begin with the legacies of punk, new wave, and New Romanticism in the early 1980s, before considering the vitality of popular electronic acts during the early years of the AIDS crisis and the enactment of Section 28. In doing so, this thesis brings into academic debate a significant aspect of post-war queer British cultural history hitherto overlooked in existing scholarship.<p></p>

Author dc:creator

• Chloë Edwards (21051914)

• 1980s
• Thatcher
• Popular music
• Queerness
• Masculinities

Statement dc:rights

• CC BY-NC
• Open Access after 2027-07-08

Identifier

10779/exe.31029697.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/31029697