Queer-Diva Collaboration in 20th Century Pop Music

This thesis explores the practice of “Queer-Diva collaboration” as it pertains to the work of pop music icons Grace Jones and Annie Lennox. Queer-Diva collaborations are a surprisingly common yet undertheorized artistic phenomena wherein female pop singers co-create music and art with members of the LGBTQ community. My study argues that through these collaborations, queer counterculture discourses critique and reform mainstream popular culture. While much scholarship revolves around the Diva and her Queer audience, this thesis draws on theories of artistic collaboration as “utopian modernist sites” (Green 175), forms of “gender collapse” (Butler 41, 121) and testaments to “Queer world-making” (Muñoz 22) in order to recover the Diva’s crucial relationship with LGBTQ art directors, stylists, choreographers and music producers.

This study historicises and analyses two pivotal Queer-Diva collaborations as case studies, both of which reflect and broadcast the repercussions of watershed moments in LGBTQ politics. The first case study examines Grace Jones’s music video to 1986’s “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You),” directed by Jones and Queer graffiti artist Keith Haring which fuses Jones’s racial and gender pluralism with Haring’s HIV/AIDS activism. The second case study analyses Annie Lennox’s and DJ Junior Vasquez’s “No More ‘I Love You’s’” (The Sound Factory Mix), a recording released in 1995, which embodies a proliferating era of LGBTQ civil rights and an aural armament against misogynistic and homophobic oppression. Focusing on these distinctive epochs within Jones’s and Lennox’s oeuvres, this thesis examines the effects, repercussions and implications of these Queer-Diva collaborations and determines how they disrupt anti-Black, anti-Queer and heterosexist discourses.