50465 - Sexualities and the Sociology of Nightlife

Description

A crescendo of recent studies highlight the role of nightlife in shaping, remaking, and actualizing sexualities. This panel invites papers that provide new and innovative sociological explorations of nightlife and its broader impacts for social life, particularly opportunities for shared pleasures and political organizing. Studies might attend to the economic and political transformations that are reshaping physical venues and sending parties wheeling across the city. Through performance artistry like drag or burlesque, straight and LGBTQ+ people dramatize and recast identities both for themselves and their audiences, but are the effects durable beyond a flashing reveal? Premeditated fun is someone’s daily—nightly—grind, difficult and demeaning labor that is often performed by workers who are marginalized from the scenes they facilitate. Who does the work of curating nightlife’s pleasures, how is their labor valued, and what is that work’s connection to the sexualities of the revelers? Politicians sometimes try to harness nightlife for their own economic ends, but at what expense, and to whose benefit? Studies that attend to temporality itself are welcome: is daytime straight time, and the night always already queer? Does attending to the exclusions and inequalities beneath the glittering surface of the night preclude an attention to tender pleasures and raucous joy? What is the sex that appears in public, and is the sex that is concealed just as full of friction, and in what ways? As always, this panel especially encourages analytics that are intersectional, decolonial, and/or transnational.

Sub Unit

• Section on Sociology of Sexualities / Sexualities and the Sociology of Nightlife

Presider

• Amin Ghaziani, University of California, Santa Barbara

Individual Presentations

• Drag and the Political Economy of Queer Nightlife - Blaine Smith, Boston University

• A Twerking Contest, Hot DJS Spinning, Disasters, and Inequalities at the Dinah - Sara Collas, Ball State University

• Rainbow Surveillance and the Policing of Queer Nightlife in the Pacific Northwest - Imma Honkanen, University of Washington; Theresa Rocha Beardall, University of Washington

• Everynight Politics and Expatriate Gay Men: Forging Community in Buenos Aires, Flirting with Non-Existence in Dubai - Ryan Centner, London School of Economics

Session Organizers

• Amin Ghaziani, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Greggor Mattson, Oberlin College & Conservatory