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Abstract
In this project, I explore the artistic approach of musician Prince Roger Nelson and how his visual style subverts American conventions of masculinity in the 1980s. Combining an explicit form of sexuality in his performances and a then-effeminate flamboyance in his costumes, Prince challenged notions of hegemonic masculinity—especially Black masculinity—perpetuated within American society and by his male contemporaries, particularly Michael Jackson. Prince’s sensual styling has left a subversive mark upon popular culture, one that expands expression of gender and eroticism for both musical performers and the consumers of his image and music beyond the accepted. Ultimately, I aim to make discuss the phenomenon of gender subversion as accomplished by Prince’s use of costume, especially that of lace, in conjunction with his sex appeal and stage antics.
Notes
1 Martin P. Levine and Michael Kimmel, Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 13.
2 Moses Weiner, “A Visual History of Prince’s Album Covers,” Complex, accessed May 19, 2016, http://www.complex.com/style/2014/10/visual-history-of-princes-album-covers/; “Inside Prince’s Funky First Recording Sessions,” Rolling Stone, accessed May 19, 2016, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/inside-princes-funky-first-recording-sessions-20160426.
3 Alex Hahn, Possessed: The Rise and Fall of Prince (New York: Billboard Books, 2003), 24.
4 Ibid., 11.
5 “Prince’s First Television Interview in 1985,” MTV News, accessed May 19, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbENboiR7fU.
6 Sarah Niblock and Stan Hawkins, Prince: The Making of a Pop Music Phenomenon (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 19.
7 “Prince’s First Television Interview in 1985.”
8 Vanessa Friedman, “Prince’s Heels Elevated Him as a Style Icon,” New York Times, accessed June 10, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/23/fashion/prince-fashion-high-heels.html?_r=0.
9 R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19 (December 1, 2005), 832.
10 bell hooks, “Reconstructing Black Masculinity,” in The Feminist Philosophy Reader, ed. Alison Bailey and Chris Cuomo (New York: McGraw Hill, 2007), 107.
11 Gayle Rubin, “Of Catamites and Kings: Reflections of Butch, Gender, and Boundaries,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (London: Routledge, 2006), 474; Connell and Messerschmidt, “Rethinking the Concept,” 833.
12 hooks, “Reconstructing Black Masculinity,” 108.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 For more on this topic, Stryker and Whittle’s The Transgender Studies Reader contains essays that further explain and historicize issues as they relate to gender nonconformity, transgenderism, and related gender theories and experiences.
16 John Darrell Sherwood, Black Sailor, White Navy: Racial Unrest in the Fleet During the Vietnam War Era (New York: NYU Press, 2007), 21.
17 Herman Graham, The Brothers’ Vietnam War: Black Power, Manhood, and the Military Experience (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 109.
18 For a photograph of Michael Jackson that illustrates this, see: http://i61.tinypic.com/28w18jq.jpg. Accessed June 16, 2016.
19 For images of album covers, see Wiener, “A Visual History of Prince’s Album Covers.”
20 Niblock and Hawkins, Prince.
21 Alvin Poussaint, “An Analytical Look at the Prince Phenomenon,” Ebony, June 1985, 169.
22 Mark Anthony Neal, Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 3.
23 E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 51.
24 “Prince Talks: The Silence Is Broken,” Rolling Stone, accessed November 19, 2015, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/prince-talks-the-silence-is-broken-19850912.
25 Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, 18.
26 Niblock and Hawkins, Prince.
27 Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 177.
28 Ibid., 18.
29 “Burt Reynolds Nude: 10 Facts about the Cosmo Centrefold,” BBC News, accessed November 15, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17896980.
30 Prince Nelson, Darling Nikki, Hollywood: Warner Bros., 1981; Janet Saltzman Chafetz, Masculine, Feminine or Human: An Overview of the Sociology of the Gender Roles (Adelaide, Australia: F. E. Peacock, 1978), 35.
31 Richard Martin, “Gay Blades: Homoerotic Content in J. C. Leyendecker’s Gillette Advertising Images,” Journal of American Culture 18, no. 2 (1995): 75–82.
32 For an image of Prince during this performance of “Get Off,” see the following: http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160421153519-03-prince-fashion-prince-get-off--restricted-super-169.jpg. Accessed June 16, 2016.
33 Friedman, “Prince’s Heels Elevated Him as a Style Icon.”
34 Ibid.
35 Diana De Marly, Louis XIV & Versailles (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1987), 53.
36 Daniel Delis Hill, “Peacock Revolution Legacy: American Men’s Fashion in the 1970s,” Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion 10 (2015), accessed June 6, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/BEWDF/EDch101015.
37 Ibid.
38 Shaun Cole, Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth Century (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000), 158.
39 Pat Earnshaw, Lace in Fashion: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (London: B. T. Batsford, 1986), 111.
40 Niblock and Hawkins, Prince, 43–44.
41 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 27.
42 Ibid., 28.
43 Umberto Eco, ed., History of Beauty, reprint (New York: Rizzoli, 2010), 335.
44 Elisa F. Glick, “Harlem’s Queer Dandy: African-American Modernism and the Artifice of Blackness,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 3 (2003): 415.
45 Henry Louis Gates, “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Representations 24 (1988): 129–55; Glick, “Harlem’s Queer Dandy,” 414–42.
46 Ibid., 418.
47 Ibid., 415.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., 423–424.
50 Prince Nelson, Controversy, Hollywood: Warner Bros., 1981.
51 Connell and Messerschmidt, “Rethinking the Concept,” 833.
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Notes on contributors
Kevin Whiteneir
Kevin Whiteneir is a second-year graduate student in the School of the Art Institute Masters in Modern and Contemporary Art History program. Focusing predominantly on art, popular culture, and performances from 1970 to the present, Whiteneir studies manifestations of gender and sexuality in these fields of art history. His scholarship aims to highlight how gender and sexuality are utilized by artists and how their work impacts the histories and cultures of global societies.