Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making

by Fiona Buckland

An ethnographic account of gay, lesbian and queer club culture in the 1990s New York City.

"Impossible Dance is a highly accessible, original and engaging account of the complex and often heavily theorized debates around the body, identity and community. Focusing on gay, lesbian and queer club culture in the 1990s New York City, this is the first book to bring together vital issues such as dance culture, queer community, sex culture, HIV identity and politics. Based on four years of field work, the book takes readers on a journey from the streets of New York City into the dance clubs and onto the dance floor. Detailed interviews with club-goers capture their perspectives on how they stage their self-fashioning through dancing. Fiona Buckland argues that such dancing embodies and rehearses a powerful political imagination, laying claim to the space and to one's body as queer."―Publishers Weekly

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Chananja · Rating 5 out of 5]

finally got to read this in full. used it to start a lot of my thinking about queerness and clubbing and 'improvised social dancing' as a queering method to build our lifeworlds and queer memory. it's a little dated though ,which makes me wonder how these concepts translate onto important queer lifeworlds in our digital age, how they intersect with digital queering methods, and how they might be compromised by issues of presence in a time where everyone is also, always, connected to social worlds beyond the one they're physically at. as i said - great starting point to think with and through. also, it's cute! the author is so passionate about clubbing and writes in such a lovely, affective way about what it feels like!! i just wanna put on some thick soled boots and stompstompstomp dance dance dance with some friends & strangers & lovers now

[Mills College Library]

305.90664 B9241 2002