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Impossible Dance
Club Culture and Queer World-Making
Sales Date: 2002-03-04
An ethnographic account of gay, lesbian and queer club culture in the 1990s New York City.
"Impossible Dance is a highly accessible, original and engaging account of the complex and often heavily theorized debates around the body, identity and community. Focusing on gay, lesbian and queer club culture in the 1990s New York City, this is the first book to bring together vital issues such as dance culture, queer community, sex culture, HIV identity and politics. Based on four years of field work, the book takes readers on a journey from the streets of New York City into the dance clubs and onto the dance floor. Detailed interviews with club-goers capture their perspectives on how they stage their self-fashioning through dancing. Fiona Buckland argues that such dancing embodies and rehearses a powerful political imagination, laying claim to the space and to one's body as queer."—Publishers Weekly
Acknowledgments
Timeline
Introduction: Impossible Dance
The Theater of Queer World-Making
The Currency of Fabulousness: Fashioning the Self, Fashioning the Lifeworld
Slaves to the Rhythm? Using Music, Space, Dance, and the Ideas of the Body
The Order of Play: Choreographing Queer Politics
Only When I Lose Myself in Someone Else: Desire, Mimesis and Transcendence
Closer: Crackdown, Community, and the Physicality of Queerness
Mr. Mesa's Ticket: Memory and Dance at the Body Positive T-Dance
Method
Informants
Locations of Clubs Mentioned
How the City Planning Commission of the City of New York Defines "Adult Establishment"
Regulations and Licenses
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Fiona Buckland holds a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University and a MA in Film and Theatre from Sheffield University. She lives in Berkshire, England, where she is a Senior Editor at Amazon.co.uk.
""Impossible Dance provides a rich, detailed and very nuanced argument about social dance and the production of embodied queer identities and space, an original and important contribution.""
~Gill Valentine, Professor of Geography, University of Sheffield
"Impossible Dance provides a rich, detailed and very nuanced argument about social dance and the production of embodied queer identities and space, an original and important contribution."
~Gill Valentine, Professor of Geography, University of Sheffield