Kick Off Your Sunday Shoes! The Material Religion of Footloose
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4317628 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Margaret M Grubiak (Villanova University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-32 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-14 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Material Religion (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1743-2200 • E-ISSN: 1751-8342 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17432200.2025.2521562 |
| OpenAlex | W4412388933 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
The 1984 movie Footloose tells a story about sin mediated by materiality. Based on the 1980 events of teenagers overcoming a dancing ban in Elmore City, Oklahoma, Footloose made visible an American religious subculture that believed dancing was a sin because it could lead to sex outside of marriage. The movie crafted a material world of sin embedded in the cultural context of Jerry Fallwell Sr.’s Moral Majority and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign of the early 1980s. I argue that Footloose is an artifact of American religious history worthy of study, and that an interdisciplinary methodology can best unpack the role of materiality at all scales—objects, buildings, landscapes—in conveying a real story of American religion within a fictional film
Ancient history · Art · Visual arts · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies · History · Political theory and Gramsci
| Highly cited | No |
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