ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses how the restaging of Hairspray and a repurposed nostalgia impact its subsequent constructions of gender and sexuality. It discusses how the various versions of Hairspray address and reframe their racial identity politics, before ending with an analysis of Hairspray's transformation at the formal level. Matthew Tinkcom examines how both the 1988 and 2007 versions of Hairspray function as historical 'fantasies' about 'black musical performance in the US post-World War II period'. In acknowledging that all the iterations of Hairspray engage with the history of racial segregation in the United States, the chapter considers how medium specificity converges with aesthetic and generic demands to produce profoundly dissimilar projects in regard to their handling of this history. How the various iterations of Hairspray mobilize genre to produce and articulate space is central to their focus on marginalization and, in turn, their configurations of gender, sexuality, and especially race.
