Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity

This work explores the significance which contemporary club cultures can have for women at a time when femininity is undergoing radical reconstruction. The book focuses upon the experiential accounts given by a range of 'raving' and clubbing women and illustrates how new (and, in some respects, more appropriate to our times) fictions of femininity are generated within these accounts. Club cultures can, it is argued, come to provide important sites for the exploration of new ways of being women-in-culture. Focus upon these more subjective and experiential aspects reveals that today's dance cultures have much to offer women, and a lot more to say about femininity than is usually acknowledged. This suggests the limitations of much contemporary club culture criticism which concludes that because men tend to dominate at the levels of production and organisation, today's club cultures signal a sexual-political step backwards.

Autorentext
MARIA PINI is post-doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. She is author of a number of published articles on women and dance cultures.

Inhalt
Acknowledgements Introduction PART ONE: WHO KNOWS? Invisible Women in Increasingly Visible Club Cultures Situating Voices: Towards a Post-foundational Study of 'Women's Experiences' PART TWO: FROM BEDROOM CULTURE TO DANCE CULTURES Down to Specifics: Study Design, Method and Presentation Moving Homes: Femininity under Reconstruction Cyborgs, Nomads and the Raving Feminine Peak Practices: The Production and Regulation of Ecstatic Bodies Conclusions: 'Losing It': Dance Cultures and Changing Femininities Bibliography Index