INTRODUCTION

Three cultural dispositifs gain currency in jazz-informed media of the 1950s. The first is the rising visibility of the West Coast jazz musician after the success of Henry Mancini's crime jazz series Peter Gunn. The second and third relate to alternative gender stagings occurring within American culture resulting from a variety of jazz-informed media. The late 1950s, in particular, witnessed an unorthodox representation of the white working woman through what I shall categorize as a female jazz agency. The last but perhaps more restricting dispositif supported the image of the so-called new man, and the attendant notions of ‘new masculinity’ connected to both jazz connoisseurship and a liberal sex politics presented in jazz-informed entertainment media, especially Mancini's Peter Gunn.

While important scholarship within film music studies uncovers much of the unique aesthetic and musical strategies developed by Mancini and others in the postwar period, few scholars have examined the ways in which Mancini's music incorporated creative techniques to both reinforce and transgress accepted gendered representations within the crime detective and noir genre. Many argue that his hybrid compositional practices, which incorporated non-traditional music genres and especially jazz and popular music, were so com¬pelling that they had a profound impact on film scoring from the 1960s on. Yet most fail to interrogate how this captivating and flexible style affected our understanding of gender and sexuality at the cusp of the 1960s, an era emblemized by its progressive transformations within sociopolitical fields.