Women Dancing Back: Disruption and the Politics of Pleasure

Abstract

en often experience forms of objectification and repression, and a threat of violence in clubs that is taken for granted and naturalized. Rock music, an integral part of the dance scene and omnipresent in youth culture in general, often tends to lyrics that perpetuate racist assumptions, glorify violence, and objectify, stereotype, trivialize, ridicule, and/or ignore (Dobkin, 1985, p. 21). If rock music is, indeed, as Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie have argued, one way a repertoire of public sexual behavior is learned, then rock music is implicated in the constituting and experience of female sexuality on the club dance floor (1978/1979, p. 3).2 The very real practices of others - from door men to cruising men - and women's own self-regulation, as in the careful negotiation of the invisible and easily transgressed good girl line, work together to delineate women's experiences dancing in clubs. Sexuality and the body often become the ground upon which women's social regulation in forms of popular culture takes place. At the same time women do find potent pleasures in going out dancing, and sexuality and the body become key to understanding those pleasures. As the sources of regulation are multiple, conflicting, and indeterminate in their effect, so are the experiences of pleasure. Notions of pleasure and desire, refusal and resistance on the dance floor emerge as the apppearance of women's consent to dominant practices is interrogated. This work is an investigation into this contradictory politics of pleasure: into womeiťs bodies as the conflicting terrain of oppression and potential empowerment, liability, and pleasure. To begin I locate myself in the research and place the research in context. I describe the multiplicity of pleasures that women may find in going out dancing, arguing that the way sexuality is allowed expression through dance contributes to the power of its pleasures. Stepping back to look at how popular culture in general functions as an ideological terrain, one where desire is

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