ABSTRACT
This chapter centers on the desire of American do-it-yourself (DIY) participants to create utopian (free, safe) social spaces at DIY venues, and to challenge the normative social restrictions and boundaries that exist within the socially established music venues. It presents a vignette from a 2012 festival in Portland that provides one example of how particular “utopian” DIY ideas are manifested at particular DIY events. It aims to study social relations and tensions between real and imagined social spaces within DIY scenes in the United States, and the political, spatial, and musical efforts of American DIY participants to create intimate (utopian, heterogeneous, inclusive, non-hierarchical, autonomous, and safer) social spaces within and without American DIY communities. Moreover, the chapter demonstrates how these social spaces both reflect and generate DIY social formations, aimed toward establishment of “intimate” communities.
