Club Cultures ─ Boundaries, Identities and Otherness

This book explores contemporary club and dance cultures as a manifestation of aesthetic and prosthetic forms of life. Rief addresses the questions of how practices of clubbing help cultivate particular forms of reflexivity and modes of experience, and how these shape new devices for reconfiguring the boundaries around youth cultural and other social identities. She contributes empirical analyses of how such forms of experience are mediated by the particular structures of night-clubbing economies, the organizational regulation and the local organization of experience in club spaces, the media discourses and imageries, the technologies intervening into the sense system of the body (e.g. music, visuals, drugs) and the academic discourses on dance culture. Although the book draws from local club scenes in London and elsewhere in the UK, it also reflects on similarities and differences between nightclubbing cultures across geographical contexts.

Silvia Rief is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Innsbruck.

1. Introduction 2. Urban Renewal and Night Life Governance: London and Istanbul 3. Club Cultural Production and the Night-time Economy Market in the UK 4. Sensing and Meaning the Body: The Local Organization of Clubbing Practices 5. Thresholds of Reality: Clubbing, Drugs and Agency 6. Identity Projects and Spectacular Selves 7. Between Style and Desire: Sexual Scenarios in Clubbing Magazines 8. Allegorical Anarchy, Symbolic Hierarchy: Sexual Boundaries in Two London Dance Clubs 9. Conclusion. Appendix.