ABSTRACT
Chapter 5, “Afro-Disco Divas,” offers an exploration of Black women’s disco music and the ways it reflected Black women’s rejection of the Black nationalist masculinism of the Black Power Movement, the politics of respectability, and the embrace of the Sexual Revolution of the 1970s. Similarly to, if not even more than, classic funk, disco enabled African American women to publicly express their sexual pleasures and desires. With its celebration of sexuality, among other things, disco offered Black women a platform on which they could unambiguously sing about sexual subjects that had previously, for the most part, been buried beneath much lyrical innuendo. Centering on Black disco divas’ rejection of the Black nationalist masculinism of the Black Power Movement and the politics of respectability, as well as their powerful public expressions of their sexual pleasures and desires, the concluding chapter argues that select Afro-disco divas, such as Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, Diana Ross, and Grace Jones, communicated several of the core characteristics of the sexual politics of the Black Women’s Liberation Movement during its final years, between 1977 and 1979. In many ways, the book ends much like it began, by emphasizing that a distinct form of Black musical feminism emerged out of, and provided a fascinating soundtrack for, the Black Women’s Liberation Movement.
