Situating Voices: towards a Post-Foundational Study of ‘Women’s Experiences’

Abstract

This juxtaposition of statements illustrates some significantly different and more importantly, differently privileged, knowledges about rave culture. I open this chapter with such a ‘montage’ bearing in mind Walter Benjamin’s belief in the radical potential of juxtaposition for rupturing or disturbing the continuum of the world. As James Rolleston puts it, in discussing Benjamin, ‘passages from different kinds of text speak on a new level when juxtaposed’ (1989, p. 16). Locating female ravers’ voices alongside those of academic commentators serves here to lay the ground for the central questions around which this chapter is structured. How can these non-academic women’s voices be rendered culturally significant? And how can the kinds of experiences voiced by these women be made to signify as anything other than ‘mistakes’, signs of a kind of ‘false’ consciousness, or murmurs of a groundless Utopianism?

For me there’s nothing better. I feel completely safe and of course, you may get men giving you the eye but it really is entirely different to the club scenes I was involved in before. Something very important happened with rave and things have never gone back to what they were. It’s the way that men and women behave towards each other. Mainly, like I said, I think it’s because if you’re in a dance event these days, you’re there to dance. You’re there to dance and not to pull. Everyone understands this and this is the greatest thing about it. Of course, you might want to pull and it’s not out of the question, but something big is different and it spills into the outside world too. (Clare)

(Rave) was strikingly different to other club scenes. There was no alcohol around, so little aggression and little emphasis on chatting people up, and the cattle-market element of say disco didn’t seem to be around. (Ann)

Rave is a completely different scene. Men seem very unaggressive. They’re friendly in a completely different way from people being friendly when they’re completely pissed-up. The men — even in the kind of hard-core clubs — aren’t sort of predatory, and they’re not there to pull. (Amy)

Gender and sexual politics are areas where overexcited and unsupported claims for the radicalism of dance music culture are commonly heard. (Hesmondhalgh, 1995, p. 9)

Moreover, although raves are supposed to be ‘sexless’ affairs — that is, clothing is unisex and participants are not there to get laid — it does not follow that they are necessarily sexually progressive. (Thornton, 1996, p. 56)

We can in no way be certain therefore, that the broader changing climate of sexual politics is reflected in rave. (McRobbie, 1994, p. 168)