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

In 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

Maria Pini's 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 women's accounts of experiences within and outside of clubs. Combining self-reflexive 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 redefines 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, Pini's 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 women's experiences and constructions of self at a historical moment in which conceptions of feminism and femininity are in flux. 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 place—conditions which allow for the fabrication, embodiment, and exploration of very different fictions of femininity. These are fictions where an insistence upon the 'right' to adventure, a valorization of 'madness,' and a celebration of 'autoeroticism' are central."³ Just as Pini's female clubbers use the dance floor as a space to play with various definitions and constructions of self, Pini herself takes to the dance floor to choreograph a narrative of postmodern transformations in femininities and feminism, and the difficulties and contradictions inherent in negotiating these shifts.

Women's voices are at the center of Club Cultures. The book's main section features interviews of eighteen white female London ravers between the ages of nineteen and thirty-five, which were gathered as part of Pini's 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...