Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House

Simonson, Mary.
Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Volume 8, 2004, pp. 86-92 (Review)
Published by University of Nebraska Press DOI: 10.1353/wam.2004.0009

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Reviews
MARY SIMONSON

Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House. By Maria Pini. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. 192 pp. Bibliography, index. Cloth, $69.95.

n the past decade, scholarly explorations of club and rave cultures have abounded: Will Straw and David Hesmondhalgh have launched inquiries into dance music production; Ben Malbon and Sarah Thornton have discussed clubbing and raving in relation to ideas of youth resistance and subcultures; and Kai Fikentscher and Fiona Buckland have undertaken ethnographic studies of the New York club scene.1 In a number of cases, gender issues

have played an important role in these inquiries. Scholars including Thornton, Angela McRobbie, and Barbara Bradby have critiqued the tendency of clubbing scholarship to focus on aspects of production (a level of participation that tends to be male dominated), and the frequency with which such scholarship privileges Birminghamesque narratives of subcultural capital and resistance that treat clubbers as unsexed, unraced, unmarked participants whose experiences are not affected by their identities.2
Club Culture and Queer World-Making (Middletown ct: Wesleyan University Press, 2002). 2. See Thornton, Club Cultures; Angela McRobbie, Shut Up and Dance: Youth Culture and Changing Modes of Femininity, in Postmodernism and Popular Culture, ed. Angela McRobbie (London: Routledge, 1994); Barbara Bradby, Sampling Sexuality: Gender, Technology, and the Body in Dance Music Popular Music 12, no. 2 (May 1993).

1. See Will Straw, The Booth, the Floor, and the Wall: Dance Music and the Fear of Falling, Public 8 (1993); David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Politics of Dance Music, Soundings 5 (Spring 1997); Ben Malbon, Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy, and Vitality (London: Routledge, 1999); Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); Kai Fikentscher, You Better Work!: Underground Dance Music in New York City (Hanover nh: Wesleyan University Press, 2000); Fiona Buckland, Impossible Dance:

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Maria Pinis Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House emerges as a response to such feminist critiques of clubbing scholarship. Instead of lamenting the invisibility of women and their experiences in accounts of raving and clubbing, Pini rewrites the club narrative from a female point of view, weaving together womens accounts of experiences within and outside of clubs. Combining self-reexive feminist ethnography, interviews, various feminist philosophical writings on female subjectivity and post-feminist identities, and nuanced critiques of the ways in which the voices of female clubbers and ravers have been written over in most literature on club cultures, Pini redenes the clubbing experience as a space in which women actively construct and perform female identities and subjectivities, play with notions of femininity, and explore new feminisms. Separated from the everyday, clubbing and raving allow for the negotiation and rewriting of woman at this moment in history. Unlike much writing on clubbing, however, Pinis study is not about raving as a phenomenon, issues of music and event production, or the politics behind the popularity of clubbing. Rather, Pini employs clubs and raves as spaces in which to think about womens experiences and constructions of self at a historical moment in which conceptions of feminism and femininity are in ux. Club Cultures is about how women generate and use clubbing and raving, not about the production or phenomenon of these cultures. Indeed, Pini goes so far as to acknowledge that her decision to use clubbing and raving as a venue in which to explore changing modes of femininity is somewhat arbitrary; there are a plethora of other locations in which women experiment with identity. Yet social dance spaces such as clubs and raves work especially well for thinking about alternative constructions of woman, she argues, because they are liminal spaces in which a set of unwritten rules and procedures provide a level of safety and freedom for women interested in using drugs, escaping from pressures to attend to heterosexual relationships, dressing up, and so on. With rave, Pini writes,

different conditions are in placeconditions which allow for the fabrication, embodiment, and exploration of very different ctions of femininity. These are ctions where an insistence upon the right to adventure, a valorization of madness, and a celebration of autoeroticism are central.3 Just as Pinis female clubbers use the dance oor as a space to play with various denitions and constructions of self, Pini herself takes to the dance oor to choreograph a narrative of postmodern transformations in femininities and feminism, and the difculties and contradictions inherent in negotiating these shifts. Womens voices are at the center of Club Cultures. The books main section features interviews of eighteen white female London ravers between the ages of nineteen and thirty-ve, which were gathered as part of Pinis ma and PhD work at Goldsmiths College at the University of London.4 In turn, these women speak to us either individually or in dialogue with their friends, sharing their views on the role of clubbing in their lives, the link between their clubbing activities and self-conceptions, the connections they see between freedom and clubbing, and ways in which their experiences clubbing affect their lives and identities, temporarily or in permanent ways. Pini carefully extracts central themes from each account: raves as a space to step outside of heterosexual partnerships to participate in girl groups; the club as a home and respite from the alienation of many women from traditional landmarks of adult femininity; raves and clubs as a safe space for unfeminine behaviors such as drug use; and rave as a space for the performance of identities. Weaving each womans own words and experiential accounts together with feminist theory and her own ideas and musings, Pini not only facilitates the emergence of womens clubbing experiences but also
3. Maria Pini, Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001), 192. 4. The interviews were collected primarily between 1990 and 1994; four interviews were a part of ma research on women and the early rave scene in Britain, and the remaining interviews were a part of PhD research.

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gently extracts knowledges and ideas about evolving female subjectivities and femininities from these broader experiential discussions. Club Cultures is not merely an ethnography of womens experience, however, but a conscientious attempt at postmodern feminist ethnography. What does it mean, Pini asks, to use the category woman and the experiential account in a poststructuralist world? How does the tradition of academic knowledge interface with such techniques? Drawing together the writings of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Valerie Walkerdine, Pini neatly acknowledges the dangers inherent in using woman as a category, but argues that it is possible to use the term in an anti-essentialist way: woman can describe a range of constantly shifting, temporary identities that emphasize differences between women as well as their shared experiences and knowledges. Instead of ditching the category [of woman] because of difference, we need to redene it in terms of diversity, she writes.5 And indeed, in Club Cultures, woman as a category is by no means monolithic or predetermined. Rather, it refers to the set of varied and yet overlapping and interacting experiences of a few women whom Pini takes care to identify and position in terms of race, class, social position, and life situation. Each female raver that we hear from speaks for herself, elucidating possibilities and experiences that other female ravers may (or may not) share. Moreover, Pini is careful to acknowledge both the incompleteness and constructedness of any experiential account, and any ethnography: the interviews in Club Cultures, she writes, do not represent a full human subject and neither are they about representations which are somehow uncontaminated by language, culture, and context more broadly.6 It is in the convergence of these multiple experiential narratives, in the serious acknowledgment of various womens real and imagined accounts of what-could-be and what-should-be, in the sounds of these women

speaking their own truths and visions, that Pinis feminist ethnography coalesces. One of the most unique and important moments in Club Cultures comes when Pini adds feminist philosophical inquiries on postmodern femininities, female subjectivities, and more general ideas about changing modes of feminism to the mix, creating a purposely loose linkage between experience and theory. Pini focuses primarily on two alternative female subjectivitiesRosi Braidottis nomad and Donna Haraways cyborgand attempts to connect them to the nontraditional subjectivities explored and embraced by the female ravers she has interviewed.7 The uid, nonpermanent identity of Braidottis nomad, Pini argues, may be understood as paralleling the liminal experiences that many female ravers have in clubs. Women raving often move from their everyday identity into a temporary raving mode and back during the course of a night or weekend; the moments of intense community that the raver feels during the experience, like those of the nomad, arent about permanence, stability, or self-denition, but about temporary interconnectedness. Similarly, ravers transgress the boundaries of woman in various ways, connecting with other ravers, with the technology involved in the rave scene and music, and with their own bodies in a mind/ body/spirit/technology assemblage that bears close resemblance to the technological assemblage of Haraways cyborg. Pini choreographs this trio of alternative female subjectivities in a remarkably thoughtful and careful way: though the female raver, the nomad, and the cyborg join each other on the dance oor, Pini allows each her own space in which to move. Drawing a ow of connections between the raver, the cyborg, and the nomad, she writes, is not about appropriating the raver into the arms of high theory as if suggesting that she was actually, or that she were somehow the same as Haraways
7. See Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); and Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991).

5. Pini, Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity, 67. 6. Pini, Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity, 68.

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cyborg or Braidottis nomad. Instead . . . it is about drawing an otherwise unlikely ow of connections intended to make manifest something about contemporary cultural visions and contemporary cultural fantasies about both the present and the future.8 In the raver, perhaps we nd a living, breathing version of what many feminist scholars have been attempting to construct theoretically. Pinis meticulous, precise enmeshing of the experiences and accounts of female ravers with Braidottis and Haraways highly theoretical, almost fantastic visions of alternative femininities is compelling and convincing. Indeed, if there is any way in which the link between the female raver and notions of the cyborg or nomad remains tenuous, it is perhaps due less to the comparison itself than to an ellipsis in Pinis own ethnographic accounts of the raver. Despite the freedom that Pini gives these female ravers to share their voices with us, their bodies remain largely hidden, effectively short-circuiting the mind/body/spirit/technology assemblage that Pini draws from Haraways cyborg model. Certainly, Pini is more than eager to discuss embodied experiences: we hear women discuss looking and being seen, getting dressed, taking drugs and feeling their effects, drinking enough water, recovering from their nights out, and exploring and expressing their own sexualities on and off the dance oor. Strikingly, however, we never watch them dance, never glimpse their bodies in movement alone or together, never open ourselves to them kinesthetically, never truly acknowledge their corporeality in action. Given her grounded, ethnographic framework, Pini is understandably suspicious of the tendency of feminists and philosophers to abstract the dance as a theoretical and metaphorical tool for rewriting subjectivities in nonphallocentric, feminine, and holistic ways. In her rush to move away from these philosophical abstractions and return to the embodied practices and situated accounts of female ravers, though, Pini actually elides any discus8. Pini, Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity, 157.

sion of dance itself as an embodied practice. In the process, she ignores the strong possibility that the ways these women dancetheir movements, physical interactions with other ravers on the dance oor, and understandings of their own dancing bodiesmust certainly play some role in their explorations and constructions of subjectivities. The alternative identities that Pini teases out of various interviews dont quite leave enough space for the bodily knowledges and corporealities generated and played with in the highly physical act of clubbing. And unfortunately, without these dancing bodies, there is little opportunity for the reader truly to enter the club and share these womens experience kinesthetically; as the dancer and dance scholar Sally Ness has noted, to say simply that one has embodied knowledge doesnt take a reader very far in comprehending a specic lived experience of embodiment.9 Moreover, Pini pays relatively little attention to how the new modes of female embodiment and identication that she identies interact with tropes historically inscribed on female bodies. She focuses repeatedly, for example, on the idea of madness as a way of being that can be explored safely within the rave context, yet fails to acknowledge the way this madness relates to the association of womens moving bodies with pathologies and hysteria, or to esh out the ways in which raving potentially subverts these associations not only by sanctioning such behavior but by reframing looking and being seen so as to prevent diagnosis by an audience of watchers.10 One wonders whether the omission of dancing female bodies and the cultural traditions and meanings they interrogate from Club Cultures
9. Sally Ness, Dancing in the Field: Notes from Memory, in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, ed. Ann Cooper Albright and Ann Dils (Middletown ct: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 73. 10. For further reading on historical connections between female bodies, hysteria, and movement, see Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Felicia McCarren, Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine (Palo Alto ca: Stanford University Press, 1998).

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might be inherently connected with the distance that Pini constructs between herself and her own raving experience in her writing. As the performance theorist Deirdre Sklar has emphasized, understanding experience and emotion are often corporeal processes: to move with people whose experience I was trying to understand was a way to also feel with them, providing an opening into the kind of cultural knowledge that is not available through words or observation alone.11 Pini is a raver herself, she tells us in the opening lines of Club Cultures; her interest in the scene as a location of feminist inquiry comes from her own experiences there. Undoubtedly, she has experienced the feeling of her own body in motion on the dance oor. And while she acknowledges that her own experiences as a raver bring her closer to the issues that many of the women discuss in interviews, Pini does not seem to get closer to the women themselves; she does not move with these women. Rather, she remains physically and guratively hidden from us: despite her belief that there are no clear distinctions to be made between the world of the researcher and the world of the researched, and her attempts to touch, approximate, or connect with the female ravers she meets, we never get to see this meeting take place.12 Certainly (and crucially), Pinis work is consciously and admirably reexive: she carefully positions herself in relation to her subjects, grounding the work in her own experiences and personal history, she honestly acknowledges the incompleteness and constructedness of any narrative or study, and she openly explores ows of power and cultural capital within an ethnographic inquiry. Despite this, Pini remains a choreographer rather than a participant in her dance of identities and subjec11. Deirdre Sklar, Can Bodylore Be Brought to Its Senses? Journal of American Folklore 107, no. 423 (Winter 1994): 11. 12. Pini, Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity, 90. It is intriguing to imagine what might happen if Pini were to attempt to generate a sense of movement within her own writing: perhaps this might be one way to embody the nonverbal communication she believes is so important to rave, as well as the sort of body-centered madness that she discusses.

tivities: in giving voice to other womens experiences, she leaves her own unspoken. A large and compelling part of Pinis Club Cultures choreography is dedicated to revising the notion of the Utopian in relation to club culture scholarship, and womens experiences in clubs. Womens experiences and visions of their clubbing activities, Pini notes, have often been dismissed for coming too closein terms of language and tropesto idealized, utopian ctions. Yet these ctions, and the visions and desires that they experiment with, Pini argues, are just as meaningful and useful in thinking about womens clubbing experiences, as are the actualities and facts of these experiences: clubbers construct subjectivities out of both fact and ction, what could/should be as well as what is. Launching a crucial inquiry into the notion of freedom within club culture, Pini acknowledges that the utopian visions that surface in many womens clubbing narratives are the product of complex, conscious constructions of self and experience. Specically, Pini argues, the fact that many women use the term freedom to describe their nights on the dance oor doesnt mean that clubbing and raving are inherently liberating experiences. Nor is the freedom of raves necessarily synonymous with concepts like Deleuze and Guattaris body without organs or Hakim Beys temporary autonomous zone, where liberation comes through the dissolve of the self. Rather, Pini weaves together various interviewees experiences of preparing for and negotiating clubs and raves to argue that freedom and liberation are actively constructed by many women within the space of a ravemuch in the same way that they use such spaces to construct a sense of femininity and female subjectivity. Even as Pini focuses on the consumption side of clubbing, thenexploring how women experience and use clubbing rather than aspects of dj culture or scene makingshe methodically deconstructs the productionconsumption binary, demonstrating that female clubbers and ravers are themselves producers of their own clubbing experience. Clubbing, Pini demonstrates, is about participant production:

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The self has to be brought into being and maintained by each clubber.13 Yet Pinis resituation of the participant as part of club world making hints at another possibility: might the act of clubbing itself be theorized as performance, and the female clubber understood as a performer? The clubbing process described by Pini and her interviewees, beginning with preparations and dressing, followed by the event itself, and ending with a sort of Sunday recovery period, is remarkably similar both to Richard Schechners seven-part conception of performance and to Victor Turners notion of the social drama.14 Moreover, the womens accounts and Pinis analysis both point toward clubbing as a liminal experience that is quite similar to the peak of Turners social drama: clubbing is a time in which participants can remove themselves from the real world, behaving in ways that might not normally be acceptable, while addressing internal and external conicts they face. Indeed, lurking beneath Pinis writing is the possibility of clubbing as play, an acting out of becoming another, of displaying a normally hidden part of yourselfand of becoming this other without

13. Pini, Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity, 182. 14. Richard Schechners conception of performance involves seven parts: training, workshops, rehearsals, warmups, performance, cooldown (which includes post-performance activities), and aftermath (long-term consequences, changes in status of the performers, etc.). Though each of these stages may carry different weight in different situations and cultures, all are part of the performance, according to Schechner; the performance is more than the show. Schechner also notes the similarities between this process and initiations: both involve separation, transition, and incorporation. He writes, Like initiations, performances make one person into another. Unlike initiations, performances usually see to it that the performer gets his own self back. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 1920. Victor Turners idea of social drama is a similar three-stage process: there is a breach, then a crisis, then a redressive action of sorts; the result is restoration of peace and normalcy among the participants or social recognition of irremediable breach or schism. Victor Turner, Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience, in The Anthropology of Experience, ed. Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 39.

worrying about the consequences.15 Resituating clubbing as a performance of sorts not only offers a new set of tools with which to explore the identities and activities of clubbers but also provides potential models of performance in which the gaze, audience-performer relations, and participation all function in nontraditional ways.16 In Club Cultures, clubbing and raving are excavated from the underground and examined in relation to the everyday lives of many women. Subtly repositioning womens clubbing and raving activities as yet another moment in a long tradition of female social dance, Pini begins to unravel the mysticism surrounding the club scene. As each female clubber is given the opportunity to share and reect on her own experiences, understandings, and uses of clubbing, this underground-mainstream dichotomy comes further undone. Raving, it is revealed in a number of the interviews, is hardly a means of marking oneself as hip; rather, for many women, dancing all night is a source of embarrassment in the mainstream world. Carefully integrating ethnographic looks at clubbing and women who participate with broader feminist theoretical constructs, however, Pini opens a window on why these women continue to dance even as they label their activities uncool.17 Raving and clubbing are spaces for constructing and expressing ones identity and subjectivity, spaces for self-pleasure, for momentarily retreating from heterosexual relationships and traditional female roles, for rejecting predatory males, for nding comfortable spaces, and for expressing madness in ways not considered acceptable in these womens daily lives. Club Cultures is a book of meticulously
15. Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, 300. 16. Reecting on a number of interviews, for instance, Pini notes that the pleasures of looking and being looked at appear to suggest a kind of almost mirror engagement a process whereby the self is reected back to the self, with the intense gaze from another acting as a mirror conrming and intensifying ones own high. The pleasure thus appears to be about being seen, and being able to see oneself, in a particular kind of light. Pini, Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity, 12425. 17. Pini, Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity, 139.

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choreographed parallels that weave back and forth across one another in a noncausal fashion, evolving and developing together, mutually informing each other: night and day, the club and the ofce, the voices of female clubbers and femi-

nist theoretical queries, the raver and the cyborg, femininities and contemporary social dance culture. Though we never quite make it onto the dance oor, it is easy to imagine Pini and her interviewees moving from home to house.

BEVERLEY DIAMOND

Music in Lubavitcher Life. By Ellen Koskoff. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. 200 pp. Glossary, appendices, bibliography, index. Cloth, $39.95.

The ethnomusicologist Ellen Koskoff has produced a long-anticipated study of music in the Lubavitcher Jewish community in America (particularly Crown Heights, New York, but also smaller communities in Pennsylvania and Minnesota). The book is based on eldwork conducted over a twenty-two-year period. The lengthy engagement with this branch of the Hasidic Jewish religion not only has deepened her knowledge but has also allowed her to reect on shifts in beliefs within the community and within her own attitudes toward Orthodox Judaism. It is rare that we read products of such extended reection about an encounter that is effectively cross-cultural. Koskoff was raised in an upwardly mobile, politically left-wing Jewish family that had no prior involvement with the Hasidic world. As the specic subject matter of the book is completely outside the experience of this reviewer, I appreciate Koskoffs clear writing about Lubavitcher history and Hasidic theology. The role of the musical genre of nigunim (song) in relation to that history and theology is explicit. But most importantly, the lived experience of the musical performance of nigunim in relation to the laws of Lubavitcher belief, the stages of devekut, and the tensions between tradition and modernity come alive in this engaging book. In the rst two parts of her study, Koskoff unfolds an idealized account of Lubavitcher belief and spiritual practice, while the next two look at the inherent tensions and contradictions of life lived, the untidy ground of culture (105). Koskoff makes effective use of the strategy of

shifting between experiential description and more objectied explanation, a style of representation found in a number of recent ethnomusicological monographs. She includes eldwork scenes to help us understand her relationship to the community and to enliven descriptions of individuals and experiences. These rst-person accounts incorporate her questions, some of her insecurities, and even her disagreements with Lubavitcher friends. A vividly crafted opening ethnography of a farbrengen (a spiritual and social gathering) introduces many concepts that recur subsequently. Chapter 2 moves to analytical issues, discussing ethnomusicological approaches, Jewish music scholarship, gender theory, and performance study. Parts of this chapter still read like the literature review in a PhD dissertation, with references that provide a broad framework, rather than a real working of ideas, but she has certainly rethought and updated the material in the long period since she wrote her dissertation on this subject. We learn that this study is rooted in cognitive approaches and studies of culture as performance. She sees culture as ideational and internal, as well as material and external (23). Part 2, Inside the Context, presents core religious beliefs, Lubavitcher Hasidims history and philosophy, as well as contemporary social contexts. Her account claries the meaning of the ten serot that symbolize stages of seeking unity with the divine (devekut). A large array of Lubavitcher laws, sometimes described by the metaphor of fences, are described. The challenges they present for modern adherents are

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