they are outnumbered by male fans. It seems as though many women in the dance
scene care less about techno as a musical aesthetic than about the scene itself: the
people, the androgynizing dance drugs, a variety of subcultural attitudes (less the
hooligan culture of gabba, more the countercultural ideas of trance), the dancing
(especially the intricate techno footwork called ‘Melbourne Shuffle’ in Australia, a
speeded-up mix of Irish and jazz dance steps) and the socially produced fashions. In
short, women seem to engage in the human relational experience outside the
masculine self-annihilating ritual of devotion to the machine aesthetic.
Communal soulIrigaray (2002) has suggested on the basis of comparative European sociolinguistic
research with boys and girls that the definition of human self in relationship
between subject and object, as Bataille proposed, is quite masculine. Instead, she
found that girls define themselves more in relationship with other subjects, rather than
with objects or things; instead of a masculine subject-object relationship, a feminine
subject-subject relationship was noted. Similar findings are possible in
contemporary dance culture. For example, it is striking that record-shop owners and
promoters alike have noticed that, even in now, most women prefer more
melodious and embodied forms of dance music. Such music sets up a relationship with
the human world, rather than with the world of things. This includes soulful vocal
club music and deep house music, which the techno fraternity often dismisses as
‘handbag’ music, referring to an accessory associated with the feminized realm.
Like soul music itself, the musical skills and attitudes of many African-American
house singers and music-makers are rooted culturally in gospel music, where
harmonies between the voices articulate an embracing community and where chord
progressions ‘lift up the spirit’. It is as if energy is channelled from the rhythmically
moving lower part of the body into the cerebral, uniting all the seemingly disparate
parts of body, mind, soul and spirit. In the case of old-school 1980s African-
American and Latino house music, instead of directing one’s devotion to Jesus, the
gospel-inspired focus was to the community and to the sexual. This could mean
that orgasm was occasionally bluntly celebrated, making the profane sacred in the
process. This was a celebration of liberating the repressed, especially in the context of
sexual politics. The sacred, according to Bataille, is ‘a privileged moment of
communal unity, a moment of the convulsive communication of what is ordinarily
stifled’ (1985:242).
Although aimed at a gay crowd, the Chicago house scene also attracted
heterosexuals, whereby it was ‘hip to be gay’ in order to gain access to the intense
fun of the party (Rietveld 1998b:21). Kevin Saunderson, part of the seminal
(heterosexual) brotherhood of Detroit techno producers, observed the following
about DJ Knuckles’ early 1980s sessions at the Warehouse, where the sound system
was allegedly fantastic:
56 SACRIFICIAL CYBORG AND COMMUNAL SOUL