Jacob Bloomfield

The project investigates the career of pioneering musician Little Richard; specifically, how he became the most prominent black rock and roll artist of the 1950s, achieving then-groundbreaking popularity with the white mainstream in the United States and Britain, while predicating his persona on male effeminacy. The project probes how Richard's global popularity was achieved amidst a backdrop of pervasive cultural anxieties in mid-twentieth-century America and Britain about the links between gender variance and transgressive acts, behaviours, and categories of identity. This research offers new insights into the wider history of how gender variance and sexual difference were perceived in the Anglosphere; giving special consideration to the particular dynamics at play when theatrical gender variance was displayed by a young African American man in this period and how cultural anxieties regarding gender variance manifested themselves among different races, cultures, and nationalities.