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Sampling sexuality: gender, technology and the body in dance music
... This last observation leads me away from the example of 'Music to My Ears', toward the question of the voice in house music vis-à-vis the conception of masculinity. In her illuminating article on gender and dance music, Bradby (1993), eschewing the idea of a utopian, gender-neutral dance culture, notes an apparent division of (vocal) labour within the music, the effect of which 'is to establish an alignment between the male voice, language, and technology, and the female voice and the expression of emotion' (p. 167). ...
... This last observation leads me away from the example of 'Music to My Ears', toward the question of the voice in house music vis-à-vis the conception of masculinity. In her illuminating article on gender and dance music, Bradby (1993), eschewing the idea of a utopian, gender-neutral dance culture, notes an apparent division of (vocal) labour within the music, the effect of which 'is to establish an alignment between the male voice, language, and technology, and the female voice and the expression of emotion' (p. 167). ...
The examination of ‘subcultures’ and their concomitant musical practices has produced a large and varied body of work, a recent (and notable) portion of which has been concerned with what might be referred to generally as ‘dance music’ scenes (Thornton 1996; Reynolds 1998; Fikentscher 2000). Concurrent with this focus (and sometimes enmeshed with it) has been a burgeoning interest in gender/sexuality and music (Ortega 1994; Whiteley 1997, 2000; Barkin and Hamessly 1999). While recent reassessments of ‘subcultural’ formations situated within the postmodern era have suggested inherent complexities, contradictions and a fluidity of self-definition (Lipsitz 1994; Manuel 1995; Young and Craig 1997; Bennett 1999), thus problematising a strict conflation of ‘subcultural’ with ‘subversive’ (or ‘refusal’; cf. Hebdige 1979), this second term often appears as a de facto correlate when discussing ‘subcultures’ defined by homosexuality. This may be due, in part, either to the unfortunate collapsing of the terms ‘queer’, ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ – the first of which, despite its rather protean status, may indeed count ‘subversiveness’ as a sedimented component of its meaning – into one, undifferentiated pool of generic descriptives, and/or to the role of the researcher (the ethnographer, for example) in constructing the ‘object of study’ as somehow ‘other’ (Fabian 1983; Abu-Lughod 1991).
... Although I am intrigued by the bodily reconfigurations that accompany each of these sonic deconstructions, I will focus on how electronic dance music, to borrow Barbara Bradby's apt formulation, 'samples sexuality' in the diva loop (Bradby 1993). Does the musically mechanised femme synthesised by techno and house prove that 'patriarchy continues to uphold gender difference despite its willingness to relinquish other previously sacrosanct categories?' (Springer 1996, p. 68). ...
Cyborgs, fembots and posthumans: electronic dance music and the biopolitics of fucking machines
In the technophilic West, netizens, infomorphs and the audio digerati triumphantly-if-precociously herald this as the dawn of disembodiment. These reality hackers dream in binary code. They yearn to manufacture human-alien hybrids, ethical androids and genetically programmed clones. They already engineer digital soul divas, aural cyborgs, Nintendo's voluptuously overdrawn robo-bimbos, and the supernaturally and surgically perfect bodies purchased at Lasers R' US. They share the meat-hating philosophies of the cyber-protagonists of Neuromancer, Snow Crash and Software . They willingly computerise their passions via text sex, MUD-based gender masquerades, naughty newsgroups, techno-fetishistic video games, virtual reality-based erotic escapades, and pornosonic digital samples. Nonetheless, it seems that for the rest of us to join these intrepid cybernauts in their Age of immaterial Information, our too-solid bodies must first be anaesthetised with utopian visions and sounds of an incorporeal future. So electronic dance music, popular culture and modern science inject the flesh with fantasies of immortality, limitless pleasures, and unadulterated agency. With their tax-funded market research and their potent techno-imaginings, entertainment systems, netters, digital dance music producers, and radically hopeful scientists prepare human matter to be dematerialised and devoured byte by agonising byte. In other words, they passionately fabricate the human-machine hybrid also known as the cyborg, the fembot and the posthuman. These techno-organic entities traverse the space between desire and dread; their indeterminate forms simultaneously destabilise and reconfigure the dualistic limits of liberal humanist subjectivity. Each incarnation plots the feared consequences and perplexing possibilities of boundary transgressions between the human and the machine quite differently.
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