12/27/2023 0 Comments World for two new wavesThis thesis, in order to exhume the untold history of grunge, discards the old categories and cultural trappings created for the genre and instead explores the performative value of its abstractions, contradictions, and abjections as feministic expressions. The female grunge artists have had it the worst lacking the recognition as both gender-fucking performers and as serious contributors to a unique music movement that saw more female-led bands with mainstream airplay, high album sales, and more concert tickets sold, than ever before in rock history. Consequently, in spite of commercial praise and success for their music, the many gender provocateurs in grunge have been widely overlooked by scholarship and activism. These male and female artists rebelled against binary gender conventions by performing queered and camped identities, that were commercially misinterpreted, packaged as “grunge”, and sold to the masses. This unfortunate classification at the hands of rock journalism and music media outlets misinterpreted the artists’ cultural criticisms as simply anti-authority and generation X angst, when in fact, many artists posed serious challenges to late 20th-century conventions of gender, sexuality, and feminism. The history of grunge and the meaning of its musical expression has suffered as a result of its early categorization as a hyper-masculinized and hetero-sexualized rock genre. SM can also broaden the concept of sex from a genital-oriented, procreation-directed activity to a state of mind combining suspended time and space and a mixture of sexual pleasure and sexualised pain. While sadomasochist representations can reflect cultural imbalances, SM can also be utilized as a queer, critical tool for empowering non-normative bodies, genders, and sexualities by making practitioners sexual agents rather than victims. The music is often encoded as multisensory, and transforms perceptions of time and place. This combination is distinctive of depictions of SM sex scenes. My findings indicate that there are certain strategies through which SM erotica has been depicted in music, which often include a mixture of humorous musical language and semiotic signifiers of the Uncanny, or the unsettling. I theorise sadomasochism in a resolutely multifaceted and critical way using theory on performative materialism, which emphasizes both the lived experience of sadomasochism and the social power structures informing practices. My research is informed by three main areas of inquiry and methodologies: cultural musicology, queer musicology, and close reading. This study introduces a new conceptual tool for interpreting music with specific regard to eroticism: kink reading, or kink listening. In the conclusion, I briefly discuss the film Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) as an example of post-feminist, neoliberal sadomasochism occurring at the time of writing. Mozart’s Don Giovanni focusing on the character Zerlina (1787 dir. 2’ (2002), Rihanna’s song and music video S&M (2011), and a filmed operatic production of W. The examples investigated are the films Secretary (2003) and Duke of Burgundy (2014), Leonard Cohen’s song ‘I’m Your Man’ (1988), Elvis Costello’s song ‘When I Was Cruel No. The study consists of an introductory chapter (1), a theoretical chapter on sadomasochism (2), three chapters discussing six case studies (3–5), as well as discussion and conclusion chapters (6 and 7). In this dissertation I study musical, sonic and multimodal representations of sadomasochistic erotica in films, music videos, stage performances, and popular music. In the coda to the article, we reach beyond the 1980s to explore a more flexible approach to camp in the artistic output of twenty-first-century African American performers of Queercore and Afrofuturist scenes, which were partially enabled by Jackson's and Prince's performances. Analogously, Jackson fashions himself as a Peter Pan-like eternal adolescent who never makes his final identification as either heterosexual or LGBTQ desiring agent. Prince in Purple Rain refuses to assume the patriarchal position of the Father. As a result, their performances are complexly de-Oedipalized. In particular, the two artists distance themselves from the extensive ideological and physical pressures exerted on the black male body in the early 1980s. Camp serves them as a platform to mourn the cultural displacement of the black male body in a postslavery America. We claim that their employment of camp is political rather than escapist and depoliticized. Jackson's and Prince's performative personas are both liberatory and burdened with the received cultural scripts of black masculinity. We explore their camp aesthetics and their recasting of the cultural representations of the black male. The article analyses Michael Jackson's album Thriller and Prince's movie Purple Rain.
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