This side of midnight: Recovering a queer politics of disco club culture
Academic scholarship traditionally approached disco by establishing its cultural relevance through a mainstream/underground binary that automatically mapped onto connections to LGBT identity politics. Often, these studies failed to adequately explore the embodied experiences of disco dancers within the club environment, focusing instead on textual analyses of music, linear histories of disco’s development, or the perspectives of disc-jockeys (DJs) and club owners on disco experience. By exploring the ways in which this binary is constructed, this project argued that both the mainstream/underground binary and the reliance on LGBT identity politics missed the important subcultural elements that constructed unique cultural institutions within urban spaces. These subcultural elements were the relationships between the dancers, the DJ, and the club atmosphere/space. This project applied a secondary textual analysis approach, inspired by phenomenological methodology, to a collection of memories of dancers at the Paradise Garage in order to point towards the important experiential aspects that defined dancing within this specific club, identifying three themes as central to dancer’s experience of the Paradise Garage: entering and arriving at the Paradise Garage; dancing and atmosphere; and community. Throughout these three themes, a fourth theme emerged as important to the dancers’ experiences: escapism/transcendence. From this point, this project synthesized a variety of theoretical texts in order to point towards a potential queer politics embedded within the experience of dancing at a disco club, drawing on the contradictions inherent to hypermodernity, queer constructions of time, and the liberatory potential of affective escapism.
American Studies, Dance, Gender, Music, Glbt Studies, disco, club culture, sexuality, queer, disco music, Paradise Garage
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