“Queer in the City” Dossier Part 3 – Let’s go out? queer dancefloors and the “outside world”

This blogpost by Gustavo Rigon is part 3 of a four-part dossier on “Queer in the City”. 

Let’s go out? queer dancefloors and the “outside world”

Image: Fun House Party in Amsterdam, 2014. “I dance alone” project[1]

Clubbing culture has gained popularity within urban scenarios in the last decades, serving as a meeting point for LGBTQ+ community. My interest in dancing in the city resonates with what it means by dancing in the urban public space as well as designated spaces, such as disco or techno clubs.

In the last ten years, art curators and artists have engaged in archival methods that placed dancing bodies at the centre of their analysis. For example, through visual documentation of dancing in clubs in Europe, the project I dance Alone pose the question: “are social and political changes manifested and filtered through dance floors?” [2]. In this text, I would like to expand and orient this question to the “queer” dancefloor, so as to ask “what does dancing in queer clubs inform about the urban context?”. To do that, I take into consideration theoretical as well as in-loco experiences at queer parties of my own, as a Brazilian queer male body. I also include a dialogue with Sune Kjeldsen, a Gender Studies scholar and friend from Denmark who has conducted ethnographic research within queer party-collective dance parties in the Netherlands.

Broadly, by speaking of queer parties, I am referring to what I tentatively define as non-straight dominant dancing spaces such as mainstream parties in traditional LGBTQ+ clubs, but also more interestingly for this project, subcultural queer techno parties. Although one may ask “what is political or transformative about a dance party?”, I argue that queer dancefloors offer a concentration of identities and social performances about relating to each other that are relevant for the individual and the collective which projects beyond the club as a physical space.

It is by gaining access to the club, spending eight to twelve hours dancing, and going back to the city that a dynamic relationality with the urban is observed. When inside the club, practices clearly come to differ from the normative practices and negotiations of daily life. In our dialogue, Kjeldsen mentions that on queer dance floors, social dynamics around consent and boundaries as well as sexuality, sensuality and identity happen in condensed ways that seem unique to the queer dance floor[3]. At the same time, despite queer dancefloors proposing safety guidelines as well promoting an open-minded social-justice oriented party culture in response to heteronormativity, the dynamic of entering and exiting the club serves as a site of contamination through which the outside urban world imposes itself upon the queer world-making project of the inside, making urban world visible. As Kjeldsen states, “you’ve internalized ideas of consent, gender or sexuality that you cannot just simply dispose when you get in.”[4]

When entering the club, a concentration of queer bodies becomes immediately visible, and usual social codes in relating to each other and the space used in the urban may gain other meanings. I offer examples of the re-working of social codes from my experiences attending two queer dance parties in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands: Riposte Queer Art Techno Party and Queer in Wonderland. At the entrance, you are asked to leave your belongings in lockers and phone cameras are covered with stickers to protect the identity of participants as well as to counter infringing social media cultures. A “dancefloor angel”, different from a “security guard” make sure that visitors are aware of the specific party’s house rules, which usually includes topics on drugs, sexual harassment, transphobia, and racism. Moving inside the inner sanctum of the club, we see stylised queer bodies interacting with each other in the bar, while others are dancing in the dancefloor. Some parties have a dark room, a space designated for intimate play. From these main features, a suspension from the outside social individual is observed, and a transition into a queer collective experience, starts.

The book Dancing Desires: choreographing sexualities on and off the stage, focuses on how embodied gender and sexual identities are organised and perform by dancing, shaping ways of being and interacting with others. In the essay “Queer Kinaesthesia: Performativity on the Dance Floor”, Jonathan Bollen (2001) affirms that from the dancefloor perspective, the outside world is perceived as a “reality” to be suspended, only resuming when returning home. Once back to everyday life, the after-club temporality is labelled as periods of “recovery”, “hungover” or more interestingly, “coming down”[5]. The temporal contrast between inside versus outside questions: Who and what is the contents of the ‘we’ that gathers within the proximity of the queer dancefloor, and how does it relate to the spacing of the ‘we¨ in the urban outside? And how is such gathering dispersed in hierarchical terms in the context of neo-liberal individualism and capitalism? The transition between the inside and outsides marks the dancefloor as space for momentary deviation from the assumed “normal” expectations of the outside. As such, I propose that the queer club offers an understanding of the multiplicity of experience of a city, while also serving as a space allowing us to practice alternative, or “strange” ways of being.

Dancing, for Bollen, provokes a temporal rupture of the normative “here and now” in the role of moving, dancing, watching, and being watched. I came to recognize that queer dancefloors possess an aesthetic and socio-political dimension that invites experimentation and distortion of the aesthetic “normal”. For instance, by dressing for the event and dancing with others, party goers constrain and exaggerate degrees of queerness in relation to their everyday life self. By playing with “imaginary morphologies”, such as “feminized fag”, “girly poofter” or “phallicized dyke”[6], queers can puzzle the ways identities and gender perform in urban public spaces.

Image: Party goers at Riposte queer art techno party. London, 2019[7]

Following the attempted suspension of “the normal”, and the strategy of constraining and exaggerating ways of being, alerted me to the concept of Camp[8], which is not only a concept that often appears in analysis of queer clubs alongside other concepts such as “camouflage” and “drag”, but is a well-known colloquial term utilized within the context of the LGBTQ+ community. First, to be camp or to camp, is to observe the world through style and taste. For Susan Sontag (1964), even the rural is camp, which makes me think of the rural more as an aesthetic rather than a place. Thus, camp signalizes a meaningful aesthetic dimension that communicate a taste on ideas, social orientations, and politics.

Secondly, if a place like the queer dancefloor has contains elements of “campiness”, they do so by consciously creating a style that is either oppositional to or cleverly plays with elements of, a dominant “straight” aesthetics. While offering space for ‘campy’ aesthetic play and social experimentation that provokes the idea of dancing safely together, it is central to remember the extent in which people move in relation to others as products of an intended aesthetic culture and rules proposed by the party organizers, but also as products of the urban outside from which they arrive.

Camp seeks to escape singular assumptions, always offering another layer to a single composition and multiplying possible interpretations. As Sontag notes, “the Camp is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken […] behind the “straight” public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing”[9]. In my view, the concept of camping offer layers of  meaning beyond the normality that seeks to playfully and strategically ‘disidentificate’ with social rules and aesthetics of the normal for its own means, what José Muñoz (1999) later terms a form of ‘disidentification’ with the normative present; a strategic move most famously utilized by queer individuals evident in black ballroom culture as essential for surviving.  To “Camp” in the context of the queer dancefloor, is to suspend what comes “raw” from the outside world and do not fit the atmosphere created in the club which demands of it to be rearticulated, camped or disidentified in queer ways.

In his text, Tim Lawrence (2011), states that on the queer dancefloor, assumptions on gender, race and sex are left behind and a new experience with the body happens. The author notes how dancers engage in a cultural practice that do not affirm their maleness or their femaleness, or their queer or straight predilections, or their black, latin, asian or white identifications, but instead positioned them as agents who participate in a “queer ritual” that recast the experience of the body through a series of “affective vectors”[10].  For Lawrence, the dancefloor seems to neutralize social categories or identities, highlighting other aspects of human body and technologies. Yet, I argue that on the queer dancefloor, categories such as race, gender or sexuality are not neutralized but rather they are affirmed and recast in new political forms and aesthetics. Where they are affirmed instead of obfuscated. Lawrence’s “affective vectors” is useful in recognizing that bodies relate to aesthetical and political dimensions of the dancefloor in a subjective, rather than objective ways not unlike the outside world. The rules and structures of the outside are not left aside but reformulated, where sensorial and cognitive connections become part of the dancefloor sociality that adds to but also complicates ones position on the dance floor.

Moving with, against and amongst others in a confined dance space deemed queer produces an experimental mode of sociality. In our dialogue, Kjeldsen states that “dancing, in a queer perspective, is experimenting with new possibilities of togetherness and difference, since many different bodies come closer and still need to find a way to coexist in space, more or less successfully”[11]. Indeed, despite clubling being considered a space of liberation, visitors must continually negotiate the space available and move with strangers in a confined room. The queer dancefloor opposes normative structures and heterosexuality, but is not opposition to strictness, since party goers not only strictly follow the rhythm of the music as well as feel inspired or intimidated to mimic how other bodies move. Understanding and thinking through proximity is key in the effort to build and imagine a queer world in which being with others is not only crucial in how bodies relate and share space, but also in our understanding of what is experienced as lacking in the everyday life of the urban outside world.

By observing features that composes a “queer” dance space, boundaries in relation to others and the outside world is formed. In the end, the demand for maintaining a space “as queer as possible” rings clear, even if the diffuse difficulty of such demands becomes clear as examined in this text. However, as Kjeldsen puts it, “in the end, the dance space is like any other space, it is porous and leaks”. Although the dancefloor seems to accomplish a separation from “straight” aesthetics, I argue that what is productive is precisely the queer dancefloors ability to make attempts as well as failures rather than achieving an ideal success, that enables those re-doings and experimentations to take place and through that a queer world can be manifested and imagined.

The sun is rising, and it is time to go home. By “coming down”, the city is presented to us again and we are reintroduced to our daily routines. In contrast to the dancefloor, the city is presented as a shared space where individualist and capitalist orientations dominate. Although this can be true, we cannot ignore that queer dancefloors are only possible in the city. Dancefloors are a product of the urban, not because they are completely oppositional do the daily life of the urban or for that sake the rural, but because the queer dance floor demands not only the infrastructure of the urban, but more importantly it depends upon the normativity which is present in the urban social and architectural landscape as to present itself as a queer liberational space that allows for collaborationist ways of relating to oneself as well as other bodies which is different from everyday life. That is, by questioning the controlled and policed ways we move in the city and how we come to relate to our own identity as well as others through the act of dancing.

If dancing alone in public space can be seen as mental illness, dancing together can be a powerful tool for rituals and activism. Be it in the shape of celebratory events to protests against state violence. Queer clubs have always been a refugee and political space for gays and trans-individuals; especially during the American AIDS crisis as a result of the cultural prejudice and shame of the outside world. Nowadays, the impact and presence of queer dancefloors in the city can be a strong indication of processes of gentrification, shifting cultural formations and shrinking municipal willingness to offer larger buildings for party organizers. The disappearance of queer clubs and their current strategies of hosting parties in already established ‘straight’ clubs as opposed to renting an autonomous space may indicate not only a negative trend of underground and alternative spaces disappearing from the city space, but also the rise of far-right political ideologies in power within the context of the Netherlands and the UK in particular, since queer parties, as I have shown, tend to engage with a range of social issues related to gender, race and sexuality as well as provide the space for not only their reformulation, but also new ways of relating to others and the self in non-normative ways.

On the other hand, it is assumed that queer spaces are about unity and safety. But as I have attempted to argue, (re)negotiations and contaminations between the outside and inside of the club is inevitable. This is apparent from the perspective of the club and the city. Whereas a body in a club one must deal with friction relating to confinement and community, a body in the city must deal with orientation and movement through and within institutions as well as urban space overall.. In the move between stepping inside and outside the club, a simultaneous deviation from the queer world happens together with a deviation from the normality of the everyday life of the urban space. This is a move which informs not only who we are in relation to ourselves and others but also who we are becoming – all beyond the light of the day.

To conclude, a queer space is shaped by the presence of bodies in their “ways of being”[12] both within the expansiveness of social performances within the outside urban space, and in the realm of the inside of the queer dancefloor, where doing queerness in strategic ways in relation to normativity is crucial. The resulting friction between these “worlds” and their relation to normativity and the distinct ways we are (un)able to move within and between such worlds, suggests that queer place-making, in a political and institutional sense, questions the ways in which ideas take shape within the city composition. What does it mean when enjoyment is restricted by cultural and municipal policies? What does it mean to make a queer safe space in the city and what does it mean to make the city safe for queers? Despite the intriguing questions remaining, this essay reveals how queer dancefloors concentrate and dilute queer bodies in the city and manifests the tension between the queer and the city notably in the phenomenon of exiting and entering the club/city. In understanding the nuances of aesthetic and political dimensions at play, we deepen what it means to dance together in the contemporary city and what the contemporary city could become.

Works Cited

Bollen, Jonathan. 2001. “Queer kinaesthesia: performativity on the dancefloor.” In Dancing Desires Choreographing Sexualities on and off the Stage, by Jane C. Desmond. The University of Wisconsin Press.

Doringer, Bogomir. 2015. I Dance Alone. Accessed March 2023. https://bogomirdoringer.info/i-dance-alone.

Lawrence, Tim. 2011. “Disco and the queering of the dancefloor.” Cultural Studies 230-243.

Sontag, Susan. 1964. “Notes on Camp.”

Kjelsen, Sune, interview by Gustavo Rigon. 2023. Dialogue with Sune Kjelsen (April).

 Notes

[1] Bogomir Doringan, I dance alone project. https://bogomirdoringer.info/i-dance-alone, 2015.

[2] Bogomir Doringan, Small Museum event. https://www.paradiso.nl/en/news/small-museum-presenteert-i-dance-alone-door-bogomir-doringer/1376959, 2024.

[3] In dialogue with Sune Kjeldsen (2023).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Jonathan Bollen (2001) 285.

[6] Ibid, 302.

[7] Instagram post. https://www.instagram.com/riposte.london/, 2023

[8] Susan Sontag’s seminal article Notes on “Camp”(1964).

[9] Susan Sontag’s Notes on “Camp”(1964), 5.

[10] Tim Lawrence, “Disco and the Queering of the Dance Floor”, (2011), 234.

[11] In dialogue with Sune Kjeldsen (2023).

[12] In dialogue with Sune Kjeldsen (2023).