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The Revolution Will Be Danced

2022; Duke University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/23289252-10133860

2328-9260

Malú Machuca Rose,

Cinema and Media Studies

This field-defining anthology for queer nightlife studies underlies the importance of what Caleb Luna describes as Emma Goldman's call for dance and revolution to become the same, to reclaim the importance of nightlife for queer and trans life from those who deem it frivolous, making clear the political stakes of a field that takes seriously the work of queer of color critique, trans studies, and the theorization of racial capitalism. While stories of sex and nightlife have been told before within disciplinary fields such as literary studies, history, dance studies, theatre, performance, sociology, and anthropology—this compilation foregrounds its own multiplicity of methods, a distinct genealogy that can stand on its own with focused attention to the relationship of queer and trans life to the night, centering experiences of minoritarian subjects and their “pedagogies of the dark,” to borrow from one of the essays in the book by Eddie Gamboa. Taking queer nightlife as a privileged mode of cultural knowledge production, the book invites us to embark on a multisensorial, intergenerational adventure, wholly embodied through the sonic, visual, kinesthetic landscapes of queer nightlife scenes from Lebanon to the Andes, Cape Town to Mumbai—among many others—to land back in Chicago, where collaborations, conversations, and nightlife explorations for the book emerged between Kami Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera.The book is divided in four parts: “Before,” “Inside,” “Show,” and “After”—a way of organizing the nonlinearity of nightlife and its seepages into everyday life, the important moments of self and worldmaking before the party has begun and long after the party is over. “Before” compiles the anticipation and conditions of possibility that create the space for the party, as well as the nostalgia, the ghosts of friends and ancestral aesthetics that determine how we arrive at the moment of queer nightlife. “Inside” reminds us that pleasure and community are not guaranteed upon entry, that power shapes the material context and forms of labor performed during the night, even under the promise of political activism occurring inside the party. “Show” urges us to think more expansively of theatricality in nightlife as a space for culture, as well as the affective force and pedagogical structure of the show. Finally, “After” remarks on the persistent effects of nightlife in queer world making, the intergenerational transmission of gesture as queer offering into the future. Through it all, the promise is that the book will take us, as Juana María Rodríguez describes of a performance by Xandra Ibarra, “dancing in solidarity with the Indigenous ghosts of the past and in queer Brown kinship with a vision for a Black and Indigenous tomorrow yet to come, there in the present of that now, our bodies performed our righteous refusal to just fade away” (217).The utopian framework to read queer nightlife foregrounded by José Esteban Muñoz reverberates throughout this collection of essays and interviews featuring the voices of nightlife cultural workers as well as scholar-artist-activists who often have a practice of nightlife art forms themselves. This care for a world that, in their own words, sustains many of the authors' own lives, is reflected in the performative style of writing, which beautifully transport the readers into the then and there of these parties and fiestas that is full of the affect and potentiality of queer nightlife. At the same time, this collection provides much-needed nuance, where former accounts and studies of nightlife have been critiqued for romanticizing the queer party as escapist eroticized fantasy, without properly attending to the contradictions and tensions inherent to such spaces. Instead, the authors argue that such a simplistic reading is foreclosing a more complex understanding of the relationship between the dance floor and the conditions that cisheteropatriarchy and racial capitalism force us to exist under. One such intervention is Meiver De la Cruz's interview-essay, where decentering the male gaze in bellydance demands new ways of witnessing and reading performance. In Queer Nightlife, the club exists as a site of struggle, literal and figurative. Places other than the club appear as sites where nightlife worldmaking takes place. This reminder is poignant in the essay by Andrea Bolivar, for whom nightlife as a space of labor takes multiple meanings as she emphasizes the very clear risks and possibilities stemming from the labor—sex work specifically—for trans Latina women around La Hueca, a trans Mexican club in Southwest Chicago. In this essay, sex work converges with care work, kin labor, spiritual labor, and cultural work. Performers appear at the scene of queer nightlife for their literal survival: to avoid deportation, to obtain food, or to find a place to sleep for the night.In that sense, essays like Kemi Adeyemi's interview of Ms. Briqhouse center the historical roots of sex work as labor that has sustained queer nightlife, supplying an erotic charge that far surpasses the respectability politics often afforded by white, gay assimilationist politics and the ways they structure the for-profit nightlife global industry. The essay invites us to consider the ways the legacies of Black women and women of color, and their multiple forms of sex work and erotic labor, have sustained nightlife culturally, aesthetically, politically, materially—all while resisting constant theft and cooptation. Additionally, the publication of this anthology in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic has allowed us to bear witness to the fragility of queer nightlife spaces, some of which are noted to have been forced to shut down over the economic devastation to cultural and public spaces brought by impacts from restrictions enforced through the pandemic, a new effect on an already-ongoing theorization of the many epidemics and crises that impact trans and queer communities and other racialized, precarious minoritarian collectives around the world. Among these is La Gozadera, a lesbotransfeminist space in México City, narrated by Jennifer Tyburczy in an essay that highlights the political necessity of lesbotransfeminist women and femme centered nightlife in the face of the ongoing extinction of such spaces alongside political concerns over femicide and transmisogynist violence that has become visible in Mexico and the Abya Yala at large. This essay, alongside Brian A. Horton's, most notably makes visible tensions between the feminist urge to create safe spaces on the dance floor/sex bathroom by announcing policies of sexual consent, safer sex, and nonviolence, and an ambience that can be felt to enhance surveillance of always-already-policed bodies and sexualities.In touching on many important debates of cultural importance to trans studies, this book is set to help structure and organize conversations around the historical, political, cultural, economic, and aesthetic contributions of trans and gender-nonconforming nightlife workers and organizers in contemporary culture at large, intergenerational transmission of sexual gestures and cultures, and the interconnectedness of our current struggles with all those currently fighting for sovereignty, self-determinacy, and liberation.