‘Oh you pretty thing!’: How David Bowie ‘unlocked everybody’s inner queen’ in spite of the music press

The 1967 Sexual Offence Act decriminalised homosexual acts between men allowing gay men to discuss their sexuality in public. Few prominent popular musicians came-out until 1972 when David Bowie claimed that he was bisexual in an interview with Melody Maker. Music papers and Bowie had substantial cultural power: Bowie was a rising star and music papers recruited journalists who discussed and perpetuated social change. The subsequent conversation, however, reinforced negative stereotypes in constructing the queer subject and tried to safeguard commercial concerns due to the assumption that the market for popular music avoided queer music. This undermined arguments that associate permissive legislation with a permissive media and society, but, to some, representation alone empowered people and destabilised preconceptions about queer identity.Published versio

The Transgender Look

This text studies the construction and development of the transgender look in contemporary queer cinema, specifically: The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992), Boys don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 2000) and By Hook or by Crook (Harry Dodge and Silas Howard, 2001). The analysis examines carefully the constitution of a meaningful materiality of the body through the gaze and the dialogue-confrontation between the transgender look and mainstream cinema’s gaze, in its capability to regulate pleasures and sexual identities