There’s Just No Place for a Street Fighting Man!: Understanding the Influences of Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation in Britain’s Counterculture Between 1964-1971

Abstract

During the 1960s, young Britons began to challenge the restrictive social norms, roles and responsibilities that governed their culture and asserted their voices to promote individual expression and freedom. At the core of this youth rebellion were the Rolling Stones. Within their music, performance, appearance and fashion, the Stones epitomized the anti-establishment attitudes harboured by Britain’s young people and made the cultural shifts that were taking place in the country tangible. In this research paper, I will investigate how Blackness, sexual orientation and gender identification challenged and reshaped the Rolling Stones’s message of rebellion, nonconformity and decadence. By reviewing a diverse range of archival footage, including the Stones’s performances on Ready Steady Go!, Jean-Luc Godard’s short film One-Plus-One and The Stones in the Park, as well as contemporary literary sources, music periodicals, Parliamentary legislation and British feminist, queer and Black Panther activism, I will evaluate the complicated, and often obscurantist, ways in which Britain’s youth rebellion fortified the subordination of traditionally marginalized communities while simultaneously making racial, queer and gender-based injustice visible to the British public. In sum, by placing the Stones’ racial, gendered and queer imagination within a complex political culture, I believe that my research will provide a unique perspective to the complexities and nuances of the social upheaval that occurred in Britain during the 1960s.