Middlebrow musical misogyny

This thesis applies a four level analysis to a source bank of ninety-eight different musicals from the film culture of the United States across three decades (1940-1971) in order to extract from those assembled materials a realization of Raymond William's "structures off feeling''. The purpose of recovering those structures of feeling is to understand how they functioned, in their given time periods, as a current of thought and feeling alive in the culture of the United States which ran firmly counter to the aims and goals of the Second Wave of Feminism. The layers of analysis are interdisciplinary, ranging from historiography, musical analysis, vocalic analysis, and an analysis of the process of assembling soundtracks. The structures of feeling are not given, nor taken a priori, but retrieved through another support in the philosophical framework. I bind to Williams' methodological approach Giles Simondon's philosophical understandings of how the material world is comprised of living and physical individuals whose processes of formation interact along lines of communication established both at the time of formation and continue as a mediating process long after formation has finished. A thread of hermeneutics runs through the entire thesis, not as a level of analysis, but as a binding to seal the material analysis to the philosophical framework.