MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

During the late 1970s, the feminist message of female equality was becoming more socially and politically visible. Theatre historian Stacy Wolf posits that this time during the 1970s also, “shifted social mores and practices around heterosexuality, marriage, and relationships.”

This increase in the power of the feminist message touched all aspects of popular culture. 1978 saw the release of Grease, which allowed Olivia Newton John’s, Sandy, more sexual freedom than most of her cinematic counterparts in the 1960s. Despite this important step forward, however, Sandy’s power was still dictated by traditional guidelines, and the sexual liberation of all the female characters within Grease’s narrative were defined and kept in check by the patriarchal forces in this fictional universe.

In charting Sandy’s sexual agency in Grease, this presentation finds me considering Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Utilizing Mulvey allows for an analysis of Grease’s Sandy as voyeur’s fodder for the viewing pleasure of the movie-going audience. I argue that Grease offers a representation of community that both subverts and reaffirms the powerful influence of patriarchy. In this presentation I read the film as an example of the larger culture’s paradoxical response to a women’s empowerment and sexuality in the 1970s.

Feminist Studies’ scholar Ednie Kaeh Garrison spoke best to the importance of this research when she suggested that communication genres (television, movies, and plays) and the arenas they exist in (popular culture, popular media, and consumer media) “comprise a hegemonic and seductive public cultural institution” that is informed, and constructed by “political, economic, and cultural ideologies.” That is to say, an examination of the most popular entertainments, can provide a glimpse into the social consciousness of the time, in this case, America in the late 1970s.