![]() As dance hi st or ia ns su ch as Ka tr in a Ha zz ar d- Go rd on (1 99 0) an d Ma rs ha ll an d Je an Stearns (1994) note, vernacular dance provided African American commu nities with a reason to congregate as well as a channel for expressive release, while the under-historicized culture of drag balls that dates back to the Harlem Renaissance disrupted gender signifiers and roles. To being with, they were often no more gendered than the wider social settings within which they emerged, and social dance became a site where these norms were challenged as well as imposed. T h a t d i d n o t m a k e t h e d a n c e s irredeemably regressive. If th is cl ai m is sw ee pi ng, truncated and in some respects crude, it nevertheless draws attention to the way participants could only take to the floor if accompanied by a partner of the opposite sex, as well as the reality that in this situation it remained standard p r a c t i c e f o r m e n t o a s s u m e t h e l e a d. In order to assess the significance of queer disco, it is necessary to note that the social dances that preceded disco- most notably the Waltz, the Foxtrot, the Lindy Hop (or Jitterbug), the Texas Tommy and the Twist- were to va ry in g de gr ee s pa tr ia rc ha l an d he te ro se xi st. How might we analyse the relationship between sexuality and the dance floor in 1970s disco culture- a culture that is commonly ridiculed, yet which was often progressive and continues to inform the contemporary thanks to its innovations within DJing, remixing, social dance and sound system practices? It has become commonplace to read disco as the site where a binary contest between gay and straight was staged: that disco emerged as an outgrowth of the Stonewall Rebellion of June 1969 and unfolded as a predominantly male gay subculture that the dance movement was subsequently co-opted, commodified and tamed by films such as Saturday Night Fever (1977), which established it as a safe haven for straight courtship and that the commercial overkill that followed the runaway success of the RSO movie culminated in an overtly homophobic backlash that turned on the culture’s perceived latent gayness. Rather than repeat this narrative, however, I want to outline some of the ways in which dominant conceptions of sexuality cannot fully account for the phenomenon of disco, and will argue that the conditions that coalesced to create the 1970s dance floor revealed disco’s queer potential- or its potential to enable an affective and social experience of the body that exceeded normative conceptions of straight and gay sexuality. In the analysis that follows, I will be referring to practices that unfolded in the United States, and in particular, downtown New York, where disco’s queerness was arguably most marked, even though the culture’s scope was ultimately international. ![]()
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