“Tell me about it, Stud”: Queering the Dancing Male Body in Musical and Dance Films of the 1970s and 1980s

Heterosexuality is coded on-screen in many musical films from the last century as a “celebratory ideal.” 1 This thesis explores the queer possibilities of the so-called heterosexual male in three films spanning a decade from 1977 with Badham's Saturday Night Fever and Grease (Kleiser, 1978), to 1987's Dirty Dancing (Ardolino). Each of the films I have examined foreground heterosexual romance. However, by looking at the male body in these films I have argued for the ways in which the male, dancing body works against these films' assertion of a narrative heterosexuality. I have shown how these films can be read as queer by the way they highlight the performativity of the male body, and through their camp aestheticism which complicates normative ideas about desire, sexuality and gender. I interrogate claims emerging from work in musical genre theory, which describes the musical as “the most heterosexist of all the Hollywood filmic forms.”2 By examining existing theory on the role of the camp sensibility within musical film I argue that there are ways that the musical films analysed dismiss their narrative heteronormativity and instead mark themselves as queer. The films do this by aligning the performativity of dance with the queer discourse that uses as its cornerstone the notion of the performativity of gender and sexuality. I have argued that these films portray an embattled masculinity coming to the fore within society (and cinema) in the 1970s, into the 1980s. The chapters in this thesis are organised according to the analyses' of the three films. The chapters explore themes of camp aesthetics by understanding camp's tendency to disrupt the clear disparities between ‘being and seeming'