ABSTRACT
Popular and academic representations of clubbing are strongly infused with images of ‘otherness’. The dance club is often regarded as an atmosphere of ecstatic feelings, collective bliss and rapture, and as an ‘other-worldly environment’ (Thornton 1995: 21), where the structures of everyday life are temporarily suspended through thresholds that separate the visitors from daily routines, education, work and family commitments; where social identities are undone and new identifi cations and roles are taken up and played with; where social boundaries between groups dissolve and where participants act out transgressive, carnivalesque bodies. In popular discourses such as magazines, fanzines or websites, clubbing appears as an icon of pleasure and fun. Images of liminality and transgression shape a morality of pleasure and the justifi catory discourse that underpins cultures of clubbing. These images of liminality are ‘built in to the promotion of night-time products’ (Talbot 2007: 19) and frames visitors’ expectations of, and scripts for, a ‘good’ night out.
