Dance Music: A Feminist Account of an Ordinary Culture
MacEwan University (Canada)
Over the past two decades, dance music studies have shifted meaningfully from celebratory accounts of subcultural resistance to more critical, intersectional appraisals of labour, space, power and politics. Two recent books extend and deepen this shift: Welcome to the Club: The Life and Lessons of a Black Woman DJ by DJ Paulette and Dance Music: A Feminist Account of an Ordinary Culture by Tami Gadir. Although distinct in genre and methodology—Gadir’s book is an academic monograph, while Paulette’s is a memoir—both texts challenge the idealized narratives that have dominated scholarly and popular accounts of DJ culture. Together, they offer a much-needed recalibration of what it means to make, live, and think through dance music in the twenty-first century.
Gadir opens her book with a thesis that is almost deceptively simple: “dance music is ordinary” (1). By this, she means that dance music culture is not necessarily mundane (although it often is, as she demonstrates), but socially and structurally embedded; indeed, dance music is shot through with the same exclusions, hierarchies and contradictions as any other cultural practice. This assertion is a direct challenge to decades of scholarship and fan writing that frame DJ culture as inherently emancipatory, utopian or exceptional. For Gadir, origin stories about Detroit, Chicago, Berlin and New York may have been politically useful in early subcultural theory, but they have since become canonical and limiting: “What has happened since,” she argues in the conclusion, “is that such interventions have become the accepted stories of dance music culture. As such, they no longer serve their original function, and their politics are no longer radical.” (168)
Paulette (who is mononymous) presents a similar critique from a different angle. Her memoir, Welcome to the Club, tracks over 30 years in the industry—from early gigs in Manchester’s queer nightlife scene, including her role as a resident at the Hacienda’s Flesh, through corporate PR work at Mercury Records and eventually to international stardom. Yet despite her longevity and acclaim, Paulette reflects repeatedly on how her contributions—like those of many Black women DJs—have been marginalized or omitted entirely from mainstream dance music history: “The winners in dance music have mainly been men,” she writes, quoting Carl Loben, “and men are more likely to push themselves forward and take the credit” (128).
When Paulette became the resident DJ at Flesh, the club’s legendary and first queer night, she was one of only two women DJs to hold down a Hacienda residency. She describes how her residency at Flesh “enabled [her] to join a boy’s club which changed [her] life” (5) and “was unarguably the catalyst for [her] career” (32). Still, Paulette stresses that Hacienda was not the only “thing” in Manchester–remember, dominant narratives dominate history. Paulette stresses that, as important as the Hacienda was, “if history is to be correct, we have to acknowledge the other stories that have been squashed down and pushed out” (35). She emphasizes that a “vibrant underground DJ scene” (33) existed at the time that hasn’t been awarded historical prominence, “inhabited by a cluster of Black music promoters” (33). Despite this, “Black people weren’t invited into the city centre–any city centre–in England and the early nineties were not a ‘Black creative’ friendly space” (33). Her reflections offer lived evidence to support Gadir’s claim that historiographic gatekeeping and cultural memory are structured by race, gender and power.
Gadir’s research spans a decade of fieldwork and interviews conducted across the UK, Tel Aviv, Zurich, Oslo and Sydney, with a focus on how gender, race, class and regulatory frameworks shape dance music environments. Her methods include participant observation and critical discourse analysis, with a particular emphasis on mythologies of meritocracy and postfeminism. If Gadir’s work serves as a feminist audit of the dance music studies field, Paulette’s memoir functions as a counter-archive: a first-person record of scenes and struggles often left undocumented.
Paulette’s memoir is rooted in her singular but deeply intersectional experience as a queer Black woman navigating predominantly white and male spaces. Yet her storytelling is far from anecdotal. She consistently situates her experiences within broader systems of exclusion—whether confronting the “lead-lined” glass ceiling while working in PR for Mercury Records (54), being told she’d never get booked as “a Black, female DJ with grey hair” (122), or having samples of her autobiography dismissed by male colleagues such as Frank Broughton for not having enough sex and drugs to make it interesting. Thankfully, Paulette ignored his advice when Manchester Press approached her to write the book in 2021. One of the many strengths of Welcome to the Club lies in Paulette’s insistence that embodied experience is not separate from theory—it is theory in motion.
Paulette stresses that her book is neither a complete history of EDM nor her definitive biography; rather, it’s “a series of snapshots that follow a chronological arc from the start of [her] DJ’ing career to the present day, bending this through the prism of other people’s histories to acknowledge the wider picture. After all, ten people at a party will never tell the same story.” (2–3) Here, Paulette introduces a theme both glaringly obvious and yet somehow still ignored: history is subjective and favours hegemonic subjects. Acknowledging her intersectional positionality within what bell hooks characterizes as “white supremacist patriarchal” culture, Paulette states, “I have the unique perspective of an outsider with insider knowledge and an insider with outside knowledge” (3).
Both Paulette and Gadir foreground the ongoing struggles women face in DJ culture, though with different emphases. In Chapter 5 of Dance Music, Gadir dissects how gender operates not just at the level of representation, but in sonic codes, gatekeeping, and audience perception. Female DJs are often marketed either as “sexy and incompetent” or musically credible but non-conforming to beauty norms (121–123). These binaries echo in media representation and club booking policies, and Paulette’s narrative personalizes these structural forces. She documents the repeated erasure of her skills, the scrutiny of her appearance and the exhausting dance between authenticity and acceptability. Her story makes visible the emotional and economic toll of navigating these contradictions alongside unpredictable, irregular employment —what Gadir names as “precarity in informal economies” (140) and Paulette describes more viscerally as “losing your mojo” (121).
Both Gadir and Paulette extend their analysis into ageism, showing how dance music’s obsession with youth further marginalizes women. Paulette, now in her fifties, writes candidly about facing dwindling bookings and backhanded compliments. Yet she refuses invisibility: “Remind yourself that few white men have a problem with celebrating their wins… you too should remember and feel pride in yourself and your achievements.” (139) Her memoir becomes a feminist act of citation—of herself and of the women who built the scene alongside her. In Chapter 2, Paulette describes how she “started to build a network of female supporters” (47–48), and this is key to her narrative. Throughout Welcome to the Club, Paulette shouts out the amazing women she encountered, including but not limited to: Smokin’ Jo, Dulcie Danger, Caroline Prothero, Jamz Supernova, Marcia Carr, Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy, Judy Griffith, Gladys Pizarro, Jaguar, Erica McKoy, NIKS, Lakuti, Naomi Pohl, Anz, Sherelle and more. If you don’t know these women, you should look them up.
One of Gadir’s most provocative contributions is her critique of “transcendence” as a central value in dance music discourse. In Chapter 4, she questions whether the romanticized peak experience—of becoming one with the dance floor, the lights, the crowd—is truly emancipatory or simply another consumerist ideal dressed in subcultural clothing, stating “[t]he popular discourses on utopianism in dance music culture leave little room for addressing problematic gender dynamics” (164). For Gadir, transcendence is often an individualist fantasy that displaces collective political action.
Paulette’s memoir complements this critique with realism and wit. While she recounts moments of joy, connection and artistic mastery, she never glorifies the scene. Instead, she foregrounds its labour: lugging records, facing hostile sound techs, staying professional in the face of condescension and recovering from burnout: “The glamour is fleeting, the graft is real, and the sacrifices are many” (74), she writes. Paulette’s story echoes Gadir’s insistence that even the most exceptional spaces can be host to ordinary experiences.
Both books reject dance music exceptionalism in favour of something more politically grounded. Gadir’s final chapter critiques the field of dance music studies itself for clinging to outdated narratives of resistance and transcendence. She asks, “What function does dance music writing whose main goal is advocacy or defence serve now that there is no longer an orthodoxy to challenge?” (170) In its place, she calls for a post-utopian, anti-capitalist feminist praxis that acknowledges the limitations of dance floors while mobilizing their collectivist potential toward structural change.
Paulette’s conclusion, subtitled “A Manifesto”, similarly balances critique with hope. She doesn’t romanticize the past, but she insists that club culture can still be a site of joy, community and creative resistance: “Community is the foundation. Collaboration is the future. Alliances reinforce the chain.” (195) She reminds readers that love—for music, for people, for the party—is not apolitical; it is the engine that keeps us going.
In sum, these two books—one a rigorous academic intervention, the other a vital work of cultural memory—deserve to be read in tandem as both disrupt the PLUR mnemonic. Paulette and Gadir challenge scholars, DJs, promoters, fans and all stakeholders in dance music to move beyond myth and toward accountability. Whether we encounter DJ culture in lecture halls or on dance floors, in archives or behind the decks, Dance Music and Welcome to the Club remind us that the work of rethinking dance music culture is far from finished.