Disco:Emancipatory Dancefloors 1970-1990

The emergence of contemporary DJ-led dance music
in the 1970's provoked a transformational way of
experiencing music and the body. For many people
who existed on the margins of society, these dance
floors represented an open, deterritorialized,
liberatory space where multiple bodies could
engage in new forms of expression, ecstatic
release and solidarity through a shared experience
of the world through sound.

This course will look at Disco heterotopias from
1970-1990, defined by Michel Foucault as cultural,
institutional and discursive spaces that are
somehow 'other': disturbing, intense,
incompatible, contradictory or transforming.

We will follow the birth of the underground
discotheque in the early 1970s (when same-sex
partner dancing was illegal in the United States);
through an exploration of the music, politics and
social practices of the downtown club scene in
mid-70s New York City; middle America's racist and
homophobic "Disco Sucks" backlash; Disco's
evolution in the 1980's (which continued to be led
by Black and Queer artists) into New York Electro,
Chicago House and Detroit Techno; followed by
countless global manifestations (from Belgian
Electronic Body Music to Charanjit Singh's Ten
Ragas to a Disco Beat) and culminating in the
explosion of post-geographic dance music and Rave
culture by the late 1980's (with its own attendant
backlash, exemplified by the UK government's
curtailment of public gatherings where the "music
includes sounds wholly or predominantly
characterized by the emission of a succession of
repetitive beats.")

We will conclude with a look at the political and
social role that the communal space of the
dancefloor can play in our increasingly
non-physical and highly-individualized digitized
world. What does it mean to gather in a space with
other physical bodies united by sound? Can these
experiences bring about the kind of collective joy
or collective agency that fail to materialize in
the online world fostered by social media?