 In this video, we are going to explore the fluidity of sexual identity by looking at the way that popular music artists play with gender roles and performativity. The material is resourced from Philip Auslander's book titled Performing Glam Rock, Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music. Sexuality is always embedded in context. Let's turn to the development of glam rock in 1970s Britain in order to see the kinds of ways sexuality plays out in identity politics against a specific backdrop. In Ian Chambers' view, glam rock turned public attention to the details of sexuality when precisely at that time a new authoritarian morality was spreading over Britain's cultural landscape. In doing so, glam offered new possibilities, particularly involving the public construction of sexual roles in youth culture, or as Auslander puts it, glam rockers unquestionably used their performances of queer identities to provoke and rebel against the status quo. This is not to suggest that all identities are products of rebellion, in fact, quite the opposite. Most subjects are constructed within the boundaries of ideological formations, however, movements in the creative arts can sometimes highlight these boundaries by pushing against them. For example, Auslander writes that glam rock's central social innovation was to open a safe cultural space in which to experiment with versions of masculinity that clearly flouted social norms. It was in this respect a liminal phenomenon in Victor Turner's sense of that turn, a performance practice through which alternative identities could be enacted and tested. This illustrates a fascinating aspect about the construction of identity, in that identity can be fluid, mobile and playful. Not necessarily something centered and fixed, which is what conventional understandings of identity often imply. And because sexuality is such a hugely contested and highly regulated site of human behavior, it can be used in highly political and useful ways to recapitulate understandings of the subject. One of the most interesting aspects of glam rock as a popular music genre was that it made it cool to blur and collapse definitions, particularly about masculinity and heterosexuality, by using music, fashion and creative control. As Auslander writes, since glam rock's queer identities were equally accessible to people of any sexual orientation, glam flourished briefly as a context in which those differences did not matter because they were rendered invisible. Of course, the word context is imperative here. Glam rock disrupted and undermined dominant and oppressive ideas about sexuality, but only in a particular context at a particular time. Some of the aesthetic of glam rock may linger and remain part of the popular culture's consciousness, however this does not necessarily translate into long lasting nor wide reaching changes. Glam rock may, however, serve as a reference point and launching pad for new and exciting ways to think about gender, sexuality and identity for other times and places and for the future. Thank you for watching.