ABSTRACT
Ann-Margret has more than a boyfriend by the end of Bye, Bye, Birdie (1963). She has a body that sings and dances with her own erotic energy. From the girdled, coiffed, and pinned-to-a-steady model of wifedom-in-training that was the highest attainment of 1950s femininity, Ann-Margret throws herself off the white family pedestal and into the streets. She runs with a crowd of rocking and rolling teenyboppers and shrieks and faints in sexual ecstasy at a rebel hero sex object. She dramatizes the shift in heterosexuality itself in the early 1960s, from a (sexual) male protecting his (asexual) female loving object, to a permissive reciprocal current of desire and initiative between two interested parties.
