Impossible
Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making
Fiona Buckland
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
$55.00, 224 pages, ISBN 0-8195-6497-4 (hardback).
$19.95, 224 pages, ISBN 0-8195-6498- 2 (paperback).
Guillaume Marche
Université de Paris 12
Fiona Buckland wrote Impossible Dance as the outcome of her
research toward the completion of a Ph.D. in Performance Studies at
New York University. The author’s project is to analyze the implications—both
concrete and symbolic—of club-going among queers, i.e.
non heterosexual individuals. As a scholar in performance studies
she analyzes club-going as a particular form of performance and regards
the activity club-goers engage in as a fully-fledged form of dancing:
despite its lack of artistic recognition “improvised social dancing”
is to her a highly significant form of expression and a locus where
the subjective and the private interface with the collective and the
public; hence her claim that improvised social dancing is one of the
main venues for queers to create innovative “lifeworlds”—that
is to say to accomplish performances enacting small-scale cultural
change which may in turn evolve into broader alternative cultural
paradigms available to a wider constituency.
The author describes her own study as a form of ethnography insofar
as she engaged in participant observation, going to queer clubs in
New York city in order to document the actual individual and collective
performance, interpersonal interactions and social dynamics in these
environments. As a long-time club-goer herself the author also includes
in the field-notes on which her book is partly based reference to
her own impressions, feelings and behavior. The study indeed does
not present itself as an attempt to objectivize a social and
cultural practice—rather as an endeavor to explore the deep,
subjective implications of an often disregarded culture. Impossible
Dance thus partly stems from a desire for self-exploration, and
the researcher does negotiate her ambivalent position as observer
and participant in a fruitful way, especially in confronting her own
observation with twenty-two in-depth interviews with seventeen informants
between May 1996 and August 1998 (a seven-page methodological appendix
details her interviewing procedures).
After setting her study chronologically thanks to a useful fourteen-page
“timeline” and introducing the purport of her work for a
readership that may range from the general educated public to social
and cultural studies specialists, Fiona Buckland firstly analyzes
performance in queer clubs as a “theater of memory”—that
is to say as a reconciliation of the collective and the social with
the individual and the intimate. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s definitions
of history and memory she characterizes improvised social dancing
as an “environment of memory”, where memory is embodied
because it is performed and where improvisation stands as a form of
agency. Thus do club-goers engage in “map-drawing”—recounting
the stories of their queer experience in the city and inscribing their
individual behavior in a broader social context. Here Fiona Buckland
articulates her key hypothesis that improvised social dancing is a
way for queers to literally embody a memory that not only defies
heteronormativity but also stands as an alternative to homonormativity—the
marketable collective homosexual identity which she and her informants
name “gay”, as opposed to “queer”.
Fiona Buckland then goes on to document the specifics of club-going,
beginning with dress, which is meant to produce “fabulousness”—a
way of looking daring and thus asserting a sartorial challenge to
both heteronormativity and homonormativity. Queer world-making is
indeed, according to Buckland, a specifically physical process—which
embodies itself for instance in the habit of drug-taking to remove
oneself from one’s ordinary-life body. But the mere fact of dancing
should not be reduced to a simple question of movements since, she
argues, it is a mode of claiming as queer a space which was not necessarily
designed as such. Improvised social dancing thus makes the individual
converge with the collective in that it literally creates an “imagined
community” where previously there was none. Club-going must therefore
be regarded as a consciously undertaken transformation of space.
The next chapter—aptly entitled “Slaves to the Rhythm?”
(in an ironic allusion to Grace Jones)—more closely examines
the interactions involved in improvised social dancing. Buckland here
offers an analysis of the interactions between dancers as well as
between dancers and D.J., based in part on a careful and enlightening
analysis of the types of dance music used in queer clubs. This chapter
is probably the most convincing in the book, since this is where the
author displays her specific competence as a performance studies scholar
to analyze dancers’ composition of movement in the three-dimensional
environment of beat, tempo and space. Dancers indeed not only interact
with the D.J. and with each other but also with the music itself,
making it their own, for instance through the interpretation (in both
senses of the term) of lyrics. Club-goers’ compositional practices
thus resort to a form of “play” in that they create community
at the same time as they allow individuals to accomplish an infinite
variety of idiosyncratic self-expressions.
The most critical of Buckland’s claims is that queer world-making
in clubs is indeed political. Much in contradiction with some conventional
analyses of social movements, which tend to regard practices centered
on the self a “mindless” if not “dangerous surrendering
of political agency”, she argues that the club is the site of
“embodied practices of energy transmittal and movement mimesis”
that are to be reinvested outside the club. She challenges both the
views that clubbing is an extreme form of individualism and that it
is generative of chaos, by considering that clubbers are engaged in
a complex web of interpersonal interactions and that their practices
revolve around the management of the constraint v. freedom
tension that is imposed by the very spatial configuration of dance
clubs. In offering recreation, clubs are “third spaces”
outside of home and workplace where participants work out original
ways of being together: this form of entertainment is therefore not
reducible to an extreme form of individualistic capitalism, and thus
to a diversion from transformative politics since its very existence
is tantamount to a calling into question of the traditional dichotomies
mind v. body, individual v. community, private v.
public and market v. politics. Buckland analyzes in particular
how individual and collective “kinespheres” interact for
dancers to manage a synthesis between the expression of a personal
style and the mimesis of, or adaptation to, others’ styles. Far
from contradicting this hypothesis the sexual implication of the atmosphere
in clubs is part and parcel of this dynamic of invention, as sexuality
is the archetype of a highly individualized yet codified interpersonal
relation displaying itself in physical behaviors.
Buckland goes on to study the pleasure element in club-going, by focusing
in particular on the differing economies of the erotic gaze in lesbian
and gay spaces. She claims that dancing can involve desire into a
festive form of liberation, for example when go-go dancers create
a collective dynamic by motivating others to dance rather than simply
arousing them. Dancing may thus imply an economy of pleasure that
transcends the body and “allow[s] a space of constantly refiguring
possibilities to remain open”, so that instead of standing as
obstacles on the way to political change physicality and pleasure
may indeed be loci of open potentialities.
In the last two chapters of Impossible Dance Fiona Buckland
evokes two specific contexts of queer club-going in New York city:
Mayor Rudolf Giuliani’s rezoning policy and crack-down on non
family-oriented businesses, and community initiatives in response
to the impact of AIDS on the club scene. These serve as concrete illustrations
of how improvised social dancing can produce resistance and change.
In the first case, Buckland argues, some queers’ insistence on
going on clubbing—despite growing and increasingly targeted obstacles
to queer underground sex and club cultures—upholds a daring self-definition
of queers, at a time when the gay mainstream has been emphasizing
propriety and acceptability. Queerness in this context appears as
an expression of diversity and a challenge to normativity, especially
due to its insistence on sleazy sexiness, a working-class culture
of rejection of elitism and a physicality of the moving body: whereas
the motionless body is commodified, movement is a function of the
body’s agency.
Another illustration of how queer “lifeworlds” operate lies
in the Body Positive T-Dance, a monthly dance event for people affected
or infected by HIV and AIDS in New York. The burden of physical attractiveness,
often heavy in gay male environments, is all but irrelevant at the
Body Positive T-Dance, where being able to join in with others in
dancing is the only thing that really counts. Being oneself and interacting
with others indeed by far overweigh the issues of body-image, so that
the Body Positive T-Dance in effect operates as an assertion of community
and life in the face of isolation and death. Participants’ various
modes of contributing in the event in particular create a theater
of memory which allows them to make sense of death, and thus to go
on living without denying death—at a time when treatment improvements
have made AIDS appear less deadly in the eyes of many and when, as
a consequence, unsafe sexual practices are dangerously on the rise.
This well-written essay introduces the reader to its points in a gradual
fashion: the author’s thesis builds up as the argument unfolds,
which makes for a convincing piece of writing. The author’s analysis
of movement in particular is both extremely precise and highly suggestive,
so that the essentially non-verbal elements in dancing are rendered
in a remarkably effective way. The author draws on a wide variety
of theoretical references in the fields of philosophy, history, anthropology,
musicology, cultural studies, performance studies and queer studies.
This book is particularly valuable as it takes some of the most abstract
tenets of queer studies to the field, to examine how performance actually
operates—a much needed approach twelve years after the publication
of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. By focusing on this
not very often studied, though highly prevalent aspect of queer experience
Fiona Buckland’s study of “world-making” offers a very
valuable contribution to the claim that creativity and subjective
agency are crucial to social change.
The essay’s shortcomings lie firstly in its sometimes rather
didactic tone in articulating what is more akin to a political agenda
than to the prime focus of the analysis, for example in her lengthy
evocation of the U.S. government’s insufficient response to AIDS
or of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s reactionary “Quality of Life”
campaign. The author moreover tends to take her informants’ words
at their face value when they make claims as to how club-going matters,
not only in their own lives, but also in the politics of queerness
and in society at large. Even though she aptly emphasizes the clearly
utopian quality of such queer world-making’s contribution to
social change, the weak point in her argument lies in the demonstration
of the actual impact of club-culture on the “outside world”.
In addition she only seldom raises the arguably central issue of clubs’
status as commercial establishments and of whether it has any bearing
on the nature of the “lifeworlds” they undeniably contribute
to create.
