See You Outside: Queer Processes, Publics & Party Spaces Generating New Solidarity Modes and Portals

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

In dialogue, and through performances and a media-rich environment of photos and video, our panel explores how public music and dance parties, and their surrounding sub/cultures and processes are creating the conditions for deep and complex solidarities to germinate or strengthen. These conditions include relationship-building, informal world-making, trust-threading and collective affective un-done-ness. As DJs, promoters, practitioners and community-engaged scholars, Roundtable participants focus especially within the past four years dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the further collapse of national and local state systems.

Alyce Currier speaks on their experiences as a DJ, event organizer, safer space team member, zine maker, and design researcher to consider how dance music events can help bring together queer communities and build solidarity and activism, what sometimes gets left out of the conversation, and what we can learn from the traces – physical, digital, and emotional – left behind by raves.


Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta draws on his research into electronic dance music, affect, and intimacy as well as his involvement in queer intersectional nightlife collectives to discuss the rising prominence of “grassroots” community organising in the wake of COVID-19.


Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr discusses queer Latinx sonic memories of love, justice, and solidarity in the lines to get into Arena nightclub in the 1990s, and the immigrants rights marches of 2006 and 2007 in Los Angeles, as well as how like Cumbiation and LA Queer Posada have brought people together through movement and sound to reimagine the city of LA and speak back to forces like gentrification, homophobia and anti-immigrant violence. Alvarez Jr. will draw from his research and his autobiographical/ memoir writing.


Kristy Li Puma discusses public dancing in the streets during the 2020 COVID lockdowns, collaborating with her DC neighbors, almost all elder Black women with a history of community organizing, to stage temporary block party happenings and generate our own forms of mutual aid needed at the time. Even while relying on a failing state, the block came together employing queer and feminist of color rituals and innovative uses of material culture to work outside the systems.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Madison Moore, Brown University

Panelists

• Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, University of Birmingham (UK)

• Alyce Currier, Pratt Institute

• Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr, California State University-Fullerton

• Kristy Li Puma, University of Maryland-College Park