Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemQueer nightlife and the potentiality of heterotopic space( 2022)Over the past decade an explicitly queer nightlife culture has established itself around the globe. Drawing on a mixture of academic theory, political activism, club hedonism and experimental art, these fervent sites have arisen in opposition to the broader assimilative trends that have come to define queer cultural life. In Naarm, a city renowned for its arts scene and progressive values, the queer nightlife ecology is both vibrant and volatile: it is defined as much by its radical political vision as its many failures to achieve it, and its disparate communities are often riven by conflict, disagreements, and harm. Despite nightlife’s promise of liberation and transformation, utopic analyses fixated on the radical fail to account for these sites’ complex relations to power. My research proposes heterotopia as a method for encapsulating this contradictory nature. Informed by interviews with nightlife creators, performance analysis, field observation, and participation as a performer, event producer, and DJ, I outline the varied political, social, and cultural visions that arise in the wake of Naarm’s queer nightlife. I find that the spatial experiments of nightlife—and heterotopia—are unstable performative zones generative of different modes of being. The ideological contestations and discoveries that define these sites are not confined to the time-space of the event, but surge beyond their bounds: they alter the everyday world, the lives of nightlife participants, and redefine the domains of ‘queerness’ alongside its nightlife territories. This provides a further evidentiary basis for the contention that it is within heterotopic sites that our political and cultural models are tested in-micro. Besides testing the established core principles of heterotopia, however, applying the heterotopic model to a community-culture that unfolds in real time allows a unique interrogation of heterotopia’s relational and performative qualities. This project finds that heterotopia, as a lens of ambivalence, is a fruitful method for capturing the complex reality of queer spaces. Further, it marks an original contribution to the field of heterotopic theory through its reliance on interview and co-performative witnessing. This method highlights that heterotopia must be understood in relation to other heterotopic sites, including those in the near or distant past, and not only through its relationship to the dominant or hegemonic culture it is situated in. It also provides a model for the exploration of heterotopias’ impacts on the individuals that pass through them, mapping the affectual landscapes and intimate revolutions of everyday life that may result from heterotopic participation.