group dancing is historically associated with the feminine, with women and gays.
House music, providing the dominant structure for techno, developed in the 1980s
from the underground disco that structured highly sexualized gay scenes
(Fikentscher 2000; Thomas 1995). However, drug use has physically ‘loosened up’
the heterosexual masculine body, while at male-dominated gatherings the homo-
social gaze is deflected away from fellow dancers towards the DJ. The profoundness
of this situation becomes clear when one realizes that the DJ is not particularly
exciting to watch (someone wearing headphones, usually too absorbed with the
equipment and music selection to look up) and who is sometimes even invisible
(because of smoke and visual effects, or because the DJ is too far away). In techno,
dancing can be regarded as a male bonding (Rajandran 2000), comparable to that of
football matches (Verhagen 2001). In addition, it seems that the potentially
threatening ICT is being fetishized (Springer 1996; Rietveld 1998b). The man-
machine is a subject-object relationship, in which the machine plays a role in the
game of (spiritual) seduction. Not only do dancers give themselves up to the
machine metaphors of the music; there is also a self-absorbed masculine pleasure in
taking control over this cyborg relationship, as DJs, producers and programmers. If
‘subject-object’ is spirit, it is also the experience of orgasm; this is what makes
techno sexy to some.
Social and industrial relations are changing for women as well, as they too attempt
to negotiate their relationship to the emerging ‘paradigm’ of ICT. Despite a male
majority in the organization of techno events, there is an increasing involvement by
women, as DJs and, sometimes, as producers. Since around 1997, up to 10 per cent
of Top 100 DJs in the yearly UK-based DJ magazine poll have been female and the
most successful ones play techno. Reactions from crowds are mixed, from male
hecklers as well as supporters to friendly female admiration. However, there is a
twist in the sexual politics of techno, exactly because the focus has moved from the
people on the dance floor to the DJ. There have been reports of women on the
dance floor who have displayed confusion when being led by a female DJ. Men, on
the other hand, especially the dancers rather than the promoters, increasingly seem
to welcome female DJs in the domain of techno. Huyssen (1986) has suggested, in
context of the feminized robot in Fritz Lang’s 1926 film Metropolis, that ‘the vamp
in the machine’ normalizes the male experience of new technology. The potentially
spiritual experience of cyborgian merging is thereby positioned in terms of a male-
defined heterosexual sexuality. In the case of female techno DJs, the focus of male
heterosexual energy on the female DJ powerfully deflects the idea of homo-eroticism
in a homo-social environment, enabling both male bonding and a sexualized, as
well as spiritual, man-machine bonding in a time of social transition.
The techno interface offers a precarious liberation to women, it seems, in the form
either of androgyny or of a sexual metaphor for technology. A cyborg subject
position is a ‘body-without-organs’ to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s concept in
Potts (2001), who summarizes Irigaray’s critique of this idea, in that it ‘amounts to
the annihilation of female embodiment before a female-defined corporeality even
exists’ (ibid.: 158 ). Although there is an undeniable presence of female techno fans,
HILLEGONDA C.RIETVELD 55