Electronic dance music culture and religion: An Overview

This article provides a comprehensive and critical overview of existing research that investigates (directly and indirectly) the religio-spiritual dimensions of electronic dance music culture (EDMC) (from disco, through house, to post-rave forms). Studies of the culture and religion of EDMC are explored under four broad groupings: the cultural religion of EDMC expressed through 'ritual' and 'festal'; subjectivity, corporeality and the phenomenological dance experience (especially 'ecstasy' and 'trance'); the dance community and a sense of belonging (the 'vibe' and 'tribes'); and EDMC as a new 'spirituality of life'. Moving beyond the cultural Marxist approaches of the 1970s, which held youth (sub)cultural expressions as 'ineffectual' and 'tragic', and the postmodernist approaches of the early 1990s, which held rave to be an 'implosion of meaning', recent anthropological and sociological approaches recognise that the various manifestations of this youth cultural phenomenon possess meaning, purpose and significance for participants. Contemporary scholarship thus conveys the presence of religiosity and spirituality within contemporary popular cultural formations. In conclusion, I suggest that this and continuing scholarship can offer useful counterpoint to at least one recent account (of clubbing) that overlooks the significance of EDMC through a restricted and prejudiced apprehension of 'religion'.

Modern Drama: Defining the Field

Theatre, like other subjects in the humanities, has recently undergone quintessential changes in theory, approach, and research. Modern Drama - a collection of twelve essays from leading theatre and drama scholars - investigates the contemporary meanings and the cultural and political resonances of the terms inherent in the concepts of 'modern' and 'drama, ' delving into a range of theoretical questions on the history of modernism, modernity, post-modernism, and postmodernity as they have intersected with the shifting histories of drama, theatre, and performance.

Dancing for women:subverting heteronormativity in a lesbian erotic dance space?

This article utilises participant observation, interview and collaborative visual data, collected with women erotic dancers, management and customers, to ascertain how far heteronormativity is subverted in a UK lesbian leisure space, Lippy (the name is a pseudonym), which provides erotic dance for women customers. The potential for a female 'gaze', the 'normativity' of gendered and sexualised bodies, and the notion of a 'women's space' are taken as areas for analysis. Women's engagement with erotic dance is complex, and this article examines the connections between sexual agency and gendered power relations, questioning how far women can exercise autonomous sexual expression in commercial sexual encounters. © The Author(s) 2012.

Performing in a night-time leisure venue: a visual analysis of erotic dance

This article analyses a range of different meanings attached to images of erotic dance, with a particular focus on the 'impression management' (Goffman 1959) enacted by dancers. It presents a visual analysis of the work of a female erotic performer in a lesbian erotic dance venue in the UK. Still photographs, along with observational data and interviews, convey the complexity and skill of an erotic dancer's diverse gendered and sexualised performances. The visual data highlights the extensive 'aesthetic labour' (Nickson et al. 2001) and 'emotional labour' (Hochschild 1983) the dancer must put in to constructing her work 'self'. However, a more ambitious use of the visual is identified: the dancer's own use of images of her work. This use of the visual by dancers themselves highlights a more complex 'impression management' strategy undertaken by a dancer and brings into question the separation of 'real' and 'work' 'selves' in erotic dance. © Sociological Research Online, 1996-2012.