Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary
A sharp, insightful, wide-ranging survey of the queerness coursing through pop music history, Sasha Geffen’s first book shows how music allows rigid gender roles to fall away in a sensual and ambiguous exchange between performer and listener.
Starting with early blues and the Beatles and continuing with performers such as David Bowie, Prince, Missy Elliot, and Frank Ocean, Geffen explores how artists have used music, fashion, language, and technology to break out of the confines mandated by gender essentialism and establish the voice as the primary expression of gender transgression. From glam rock and punk to disco, techno, and hip-hop, music helped set the stage for today’s conversations about trans rights and recognition of nonbinary and third-gender identities. Glitter Up the Dark takes a long look back at the path that led here.
Praise for GLITTER UP THE DARK
“[Glitter Up the Dark] is a unique examination of gender fluidity and queerness across genres of popular music; a must-read for music lovers.”—Ms. Magazine
“Fortunately, there are progressive art objects. There are transgressive art objects. But every now and then, we get revolutionary art objects that change how we talk, read, and think. Sasha Geffen’s Glitter Up the Dark changed the way I hear music and the convenient way I understand gender and performance in and outside of music. One will not hear or reproduce traditional understandings of gender ever again after experiencing this boldly brilliant book.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
“With simply brilliant writing and joyfully queer insights, Sasha Geffen dives deep into rock’s gendersmashing history, reminding us of the ecstatic potential when art and transgression collide.”—Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir and creator of the Drag Queen Story Hour
“How does music make gender audible in all of its rich, expressive, shifting forms, far beyond binary definitions? How have artists as ubiquitous as the Beatles and as cult-yet-crucial as Poly Styrene or Wendy Carlos helped us hear and understand the truths of bodies who, as the author writes, demand to choose their own shapes? This scintillating and deeply considered history of pop’s queer and trans history answers those questions with inspiring stories of rebellion and community, bratty punks and androgynous poets, studio inventors and prophets of the dance floor. An absolutely necessary account of what has always been the heart of popular music: transformation.”—Ann Powers, author of Good Booty
“Sasha Geffen follows the glamour and the glitter across a musical universe of queer and trans performances. Not looking simply at particular stars nor following a musical movement like punk from its roots to its demise, Glitter Up the Dark travels the multiple lanes of a trans-musical express. With riffs on the trans voice, careful attention to histories of performance, reception, and fashion, and theories of queer time and space, this book sparkles and glows. Read it, listen to it, love it.”—Jack Halberstam, author of Gaga Feminism
$18.95 paperback
978-1-4773-1878-2
PUBLICATION DATE:
APRIL 7, 2020
