Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”

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New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s

Preface 1 Postmodernity and the Crisis of Democracy 2 A War of All Against All: Neoliberal Hegemony and Competitive Individualism 3 Leviathan Logics: Group Psychology from Hobbes to Laclau 4 The State of Community Opened: Multitude and Multiplicity 5 The Non-Fascist Crowd: Individuation and Infinite Relationality 6 Feeling Together: Affect, Identity and the Politics of the Common 7 On the Impossibility of Making Decisions: Affect, Agency and the Democratic Sublime Conclusions Notes Index

Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism

Recorded music is as different to live music as film is to theatre. In this book, Simon Zagorski-Thomas employs current theories from psychology and sociology to examine how recorded music is made and how we listen to it. Setting out a framework for the study of recorded music and record production, he explains how recorded music is fundamentally different to live performance, how record production influences our interpretation of musical meaning and how the various participants in the process interact with technology to produce recorded music. He combines ideas from the ecological approach to perception, embodied cognition and the social construction of technological systems to provide a summary of theoretical approaches that are applied to the sound of the music and the creative activity of production. A wide range of examples from Zagorski-Thomas's professional experience reveal these ideas in action.

 Proposes a new agenda for the study of recorded music and record production
 Discusses record production in terms of its collaborative creative practice and the interpretation of its musical output rather than in purely technical terms
 Co-chairman of the Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production, Zagorski-Thomas has a unique overview of the developing culture of research and teaching about record production

The Musicology of Record Production

Therapeutic touch has played an important part in human civilization and continues to contribute to our social relations and individual identities. Therapeutic touch has been a vital component in the development and definition of physiotherapy practice and continues to be one of the profession's principal distinguishing competencies. It is surprising then that while so much has been written about how to perform therapeutic touch techniques, little has been written about the role that these techniques have played in defining physiotherapy's professional identity. Drawing on the work of three postmodern philosophers, we offer a critique of physio-therapeutic approaches to therapeutic touch, examining why certain modes of touch were adopted by the profession in the past and not others; how the innate sensuality of touch had to be managed; and how the disciplinary technologies that surrounded the practice of massage came to define physiotherapy's professional identity. Our thesis is that the disciplinary technologies adopted by the profession in the 1890s endure today and that the profession's heavily disciplined approach to touch is now constraining new therapeutic possibilities that may be necessary if the profession is to respond to the demands of twenty-first century health care.

Discipline, desire, and transgression in physiotherapy practice.

Figures vii Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii Introduction 1 1. beginnings House Parties and Discotheques 5 2. consolidation Party Pariahs and the Path to Permanent Revolution 33 3. pollination The Rise of the Downtown Party Network 55 4. recognition The Crystallization of a Sound 83 5. visibility The Message of Love and the Disco Mix 117 6. expansion Record Pools, Music Labels, New Clubs 155 7. prominence Forums, Formats, Franchises 205 8. ascendancy Eurodisco, Midtown, Downtown, Out-of-Town 251 9. dominance Disco Takes Over 303 10. turbulence Backlash and Survival 363 Epilogue 433 Notes 443 Selected Discography 457 Selected Bibliography 473 Index 477

Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979

Disco is associated commonly with the highly commercial and socially regressive Studio 54 and Saturday Night Fever. However, the movement that preceded, ran parallel and ultimately outlasted these articulations of the culture was queer in terms of its refusal of both straight normative and gay normative articulations. The queer make-up of disco culture was grounded in its sexually mixed demographic base in New York private party and public discotheque venues, which constitute the focus of the article. Four key areas of queerness are considered in turn: disco's break with traditional couples dancing as the basis of social dance, and the queer recasting of the dancing body as a site of affective intensities that underpins a form of collective sociality; the DJ practice of cross-generic sounds and creating a musical set in conjunction with the dancing crowd; the sonic make-up of disco music, and in particular its polymorphous component; and the alternative experience of temporality and space on the dance floor, as well as the destabilizing impact of a range of dance floor technologies. The work of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Richard Dyer and Judith Halberstam is considered. The article concludes with an analysis of the politicised backlash against disco in the late 1970s.

Disco and the queering of the dance floor

Disco, it is commonly understood, drummed its drums and twirled its twirls across an explicit gay-straight divide. In the beginning, the story goes, disco was gay: Gay dancers went to gay clubs, celebrated their newly liberated status by dancing with other men, and discovered a vicarious voice in the form of disco's soul and gospel-oriented divas. Received wisdom has it that straights, having played no part in this embryonic moment, co-opted the culture after they cottoned onto its chic status and potential profitability. With Sylvester and John Travolta marking out the polar opposites of disco's terrain, it was supposed to be easy to spot the difference. The sequined black gay falsetto, who delivered soul and gospel-charged disco, embodied the movement's gay roots, while the white straight hustling star of Saturday Night Fever, who was happiest dancing to the shrill pop of the Bee Gees, represented its commercialisation and suburbanisation. In this article, however, I want to refract this popular analysis through a queer lens in order to explore not just the mixed composition of early dance crowds, which I take to be a historical given (Lawrence 2004a), but, more importantly, the way in which both the dance floor experience and disco's musical aesthetics could be said to be queer (rather than gay). I will also examine how disco producers, responding to the mainstreaming of disco culture from the mid-1970s onwards, took the genre in fresh and unsettling directions. These questions will be explored through the decidedly odd figure of Arthur Russell, whose disco releases stand as an allegory of the unexplored relationship between gay and queer disco.

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“I Want to See All My Friends At Once”: Arthur Russell and the Queering of Gay Disco

An influential private party for white gay men that opened in downtown New York in 1980 and closed in 1988, the Saint was a prolific employer of high-profile DJs, yet their work has gone largely unanalysed. This article describes and contextualises the aesthetic of these DJs, paying particular attention to the way they initially embraced music recorded by African American musicians, yet shifted to a notably “whiter” sound across 1982 and 1983, during which time new wave and Hi-NRG recordings were heard much more regularly at the spot. The piece argues that this shift took place as a result of a number of factors, including the introduction of a consumer ethos at the venue, the deepening influence of identity politics and the encroaching impact of AIDS, which decimated the venue’s membership. These developments led Saint DJs to place an ever-greater emphasis on the creation of a smooth and seamless aesthetic that enhanced the crowd’s embrace of a synchronized dancing style. DJs working in electronic dance music scenes would go on to adopt important elements of this approach.

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The Forging of a White Gay Aesthetic at the Saint, 1980-84

Derek Jarman's Blue did not explode onto the cinematic world in the full
glory of Hollywood hype. When the film was premiered at the Venice
Biennale in June 1993, McDonald's didn't organize a special promotion of
blue hamburgers, and Coca-Cola stuck to its red-colored cans and browncolored
drink. Nor were there dozens of photographers hustling for the
best shot of the sexiest star as the audience gathered at the Palazzo de
Cinema. No, the screening of Jarman's film passed quietly-just Jarman
himself, a single reporter, a small audience, and seventy-six minutes of
unchanging blue celluloid backed by a soundtrack about the director's
experience of living and dying with AIDS.

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Tim Lawrence

Papers

Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979

Disco and the queering of the dance floor

“I Want to See All My Friends At Once”: Arthur Russell and the Queering of Gay Disco

The Forging of a White Gay Aesthetic at the Saint, 1980-84

AIDS, the Problem of Representation, and Plurality in Derek Jarman's Blue