The Gendered Jazz Aesthetics of That Man of Mine: The International Sweethearts of Rhythm and Independent Black Sound Film

This chapter examines the musical and visual performances of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm in an all-black-cast film entitled That Man of Mine (1946) in the context of independent black musical films and black theatrical forms. By connecting the musical, gendered, and racial representations of these jazz women with other gendered performative texts during the 1930s and 1940s, I suggest that both William Alexander, the independent African American director of the film, and the female musicians of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm exploited the combined musical, visual, and narrative capabilities of sound film to propose a more flexible identity for female jazz musicians, one which began to challenge proscribed racial interactions by featuring the unprecedented culturally and racially integrated International Sweethearts of Rhythm in 1946.