Theatres of Memory: The Politics and Poetics of Improvised Social Dancing in Queer Clubs

Scholars who take up Fiona Buckland’s Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making will step into the vastly underexplored arena that Buckland defines as “improvised social dancing in queer clubs” (2). Based on four years (1994–1998) of fieldwork and detailed interviews with New York’s queer club-goers, her book describes the forms of preparation, performance, and politicized exchange that transpire in these volatile sites. As Buckland observes from the start, “the subject of improvised social dancing has been relegated to the sidelines in scholarship, not least because of its perceived impossibility—that is, its resistance to discursive description” (2). Formal, scored modes of social dance such as the tango are difficult enough to translate into words. What, then, about the spontaneous, often ineffable actions and gestures that transpire in queer clubs? How does one forge a theory of value for the affective knowledge that emerges from this seemingly inchoate mode of performance? What promises, possibilities, and ways of relating to others does such movement signify to its diverse practitioners? How does ephemeral dance set enduring politics in motion?

In her first chapter, “The Theatre of Queer World-Making,” Buckland outlines the parameters that will enable her to archive the social worlds and practices encountered in the course of her research. One of her primary tasks is to delineate the forms of collective interaction that she will discuss. Buckland uses the concept of a “lifeworld” to distinguish the diverse constellations of people who frequent queer dance clubs from more conventionally defined communities. She draws upon a definition and distinction made by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner in their article, “Sex in Public,” in which they argue that a lifeworld differs from a community or group because it “necessarily includes more people than can be identified, more spaces than can be mapped beyond a few reference points, [and] modes of feeling that can be learned rather than experienced as a birthright” (558). This expansive sense of how, where, and why specific people come together in order to dance enables the author to address some key challenges that accompany writing about queer sociality. In short, the “lifeworld” paradigm allows her to focus on particular inhabitants of particular spaces while at the same time contesting facile claims about gay and lesbian “identity,” as well as utopian ideals of “community.”

In an effort to provide readers with a more concrete sense of New York’s evolving queer lifeworlds, Buckland redefines both space and the status of the performers who occupy such spaces. “Lifeworlds” are “environments created by their participants that contain many voices, many practices, and not a few tensions” (4). These are not “bordered cultures with recognizable laws,” but “productions in the moment,” spaces that remain “fluid and moving by means of the dancing body” (4). Similarly, the subjects who produce such mobile environs are hardly static in how they understand and perform the points of interaction between their race, socioeconomic background, and same-sex attractions: “Identity is not fixed, but tied to movement and its contexts” (5).

In reconfiguring space and identity as contingent on movement and contexts, Buckland refers to José Muñoz’s important essay “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” He defines the ephemeral as “linked to alternate modes of [...] narrativity like memory and performance: it is all those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself” (10). Attention to such residue is a key part of Buckland’s methodology, and it is central to understanding how her project diverges from text-based explorations of queer history. In contrast to historians who focus on play texts, reviews, and other forms of printed documentation, her evidence revolves around people’s memories of what happened to them while getting ready to go out, while dancing, while cruising, while having sex, while walking home in the wee hours of the morning. Her analyses draw upon anecdotes, impressions, and lingering experiences that...