On the club scene and at festivals, people still dance all too often to the beats of male DJs. Men still predominantly have the deciding vote here, but over the past decade, these spaces have discovered that female producers also exist. Somewhere in between, LGBTQIA+ artists are also trying to gain a space on the same stage. Nevertheless, the live music industry is still mainly a heteronormative, male business. In reaction, various queer feminist collectives and initiatives have emerged in recent years, building their own ‘safe.r space’ and working towards greater diversity, equality and inclusivity on the dance floor.
Visibility
It is indisputable that both female and queer artists get far less visibility than their male colleagues. Just as art galleries are still mainly the territory of white, cisgender men, the latter are often the directors and managers of concert venues and media outlets specialising in dance, such as radio stations and magazines. And these white, cisgendered men often seem to have a hard time seeing you if you are not a white, cisgendered man. There also appears to be little room for manoeuvre: despite the call for more diversity, job vacancies are often filled by people who are recognisable to leaders. Even queer events are mainly organised by straight or cisgendered men. That makes it essential to continue calling artistic and business managers to account for the lack of diversity in their selections. The programming of festivals, concert venues, radio stations and editorial choices in printed media, and consequently the visibility they give artists, do not only give artists an income but also influence the way our entire society thinks about diversity. Visibility is important to inspire a new generation of artists, but it is also crucial to the acceptance of those who currently feel excluded from society. If you don’t give a platform today to the female or queer artists who have everything it takes to be a headliner tomorrow, how will they ever be able to grow into headline artists?
Summer evenings in Brussels
I’m standing in line for the Brussels nightclub C12. When my friends and I get to the entrance, a C12 employee asks whether we know about the club and the music they play there; we also hear about C12’s safety policy. ‘Don’t do anything without the other person’s permission. There is a helpdesk where you can alert us to any problems. If you see someone in need, help them. That way we all work together to keep things safe.’ C12 is one of Brussels’ more aware nightclubs. It is a club where the organisers have the courage to admit their mistakes. However, they haven’t got this far without setbacks. In 2018, the German DJ Konstantin, who runs the techno label Giegling, was accused of verbal and physical sexual harassment by several women. Just that week, C12 had programmed a Giegling event with Konstantin as the main act. Clubbers at C12 complained about the poster, and the event was cancelled. C12 decided to present an entirely female line-up that evening instead.
Since then, C12 has tried to pamper its audience with a highly diverse offering. For example, drag performer Juriji Van de Klee organised her Benediction evenings there. One of the highlights was an evening with Honey Dijon, known as a trailblazer for the trans DJ community, at the turntables. The programming also reveals a certain awareness at C12 of the role that trans, LGBTQIA+ artists and women have played in the history of electronic music, a role that should not be underestimated. That does not prevent C12 from slipping up now and again, and neither does it silence criticism of the motivation for the diverse programming at what is, after all, a commercial club. During my recent night out at C12, the line-up was entirely male. That was also reflected in the striking predominance of men in the audience. Looking around for a moment as I danced, I found myself entirely surrounded by men. Unfortunately, this is not the first time I have felt alone somewhere as a queer woman. That stands in stark contrast to the diverse audience who came to dance at the ‘experimental ecosystem’ of Circle Park in Anderlecht two weeks earlier to the techno beats of a programme filled by three Brussels-based queer feminist collectives: Missfitte, Rebel and Not Your Techno. These three collectives are all strong advocates in their own way for more diversity, equality, and inclusion on the dance floor. The line-up consisted entirely of female and/or queer DJs, and the dance floor was bursting with people of colour, women, queers, non-binary and – incidentally – cisgender people. Strikingly, the first ten metres of the dance floor were reserved for women and queers. ‘Women and queers to the front’ read the placards. In the toilets, there were reminders everywhere than the organisers aimed to create a safe.r space, including a telephone number where you could leave comments. There was also a staff member at the entrance explaining that this was a safe.r space. As Yasmine Dammak of Not Your Techno explains: ‘We feel that our biggest achievement thus far is creating a safe.r space. We have implemented this safe.r space in several party series, with the best being our party at Décoratelier in August 2021 and our recent edition with our fellows from Missfitte and Rebel collectives. The crowd was so diverse, loving, and respectful.’
Stolen history
The demographics of the electronic dance scene are totally different to the way they were in the early years. House music began in Chicago in the 1980s as an underground phenomenon played mainly by black DJs. The audience were very diverse as well: queers and women experienced these house parties as a safe space. During the 1990s and 2000s, the genre was picked up in Europe by a mainly white, male audience. The origins of the music in the black and queer community had been forgotten by then, and house, like all other dance music, was seen as entertainment for the white community. That has meant that new generations of visitors constantly have to be reminded of the history of electronic dance music. Unfortunately, the reactions are not always positive. ‘Keep politics out of music’ is an intermittent rallying cry when attention is drawn to discrimination and harassment on the dance floor. But as the American DJ Umfang said during a debate on Techno Activism at the Polish festival Unsound in 2017: ‘Being a woman is a political act.’ Constantly demanding your own space and right to exist is something you have to do as a queer as well as a woman.
Although the black (gay) community played a major role in the emergence of electronic music, you still hardly find people of colour and/or with a different gender identity in positions where they can have a decisive voice in creating change. That is why, as a first step, promotors, artists and club owners – who build their organisation or brand on the basis of that culture, after all – should take a more robust attitude to diversity, equality and inclusion on the dance floor. Yasmine Dammak is ready with a few suggestions: ‘They can start with adapting their door policy, informing people at the entrance… By briefing their staff about their presence… Adapt and improve their communication skills to solve problems but certainly also to anticipate them.’ Many studies have since shown that a diverse audience offers the best guarantee for the preservation of values and the sustainable development of organisations. Or, as Dammak puts it: ‘We would also like to see changes in their recruitment pool. The more representation we have in the club scene, the safer we can feel, the more recognition we feel too.’
Is knowledge power?
Year after year, the figures have been backing up the sorry state of diversity, equality and inclusivity on stage. The organisation female:pressure has been publishing its FACTS survey every two years since 2013. It studies the proportions of male/female/non-binary performing artists at festivals. The figures for 2020-2021 show a slight increase in female and non-binary artists on stage to 27% (combined!). In 2014, this figure was less than 10% at the electronic music festivals studied. These figures seem to be confirmed by the report published by the Walloon-Brussels organisation Scivias in June 2022. Scivias investigated the gender distribution at festivals in Wallonia and Brussels in the summer of 2022. It came to the conclusion that of the 1255 solo artists counted, 78% could be associated with the male gender, 21% with the female gender and fewer than 0.5% identified themselves as non-binary. These staggering numbers are also confirmed by The Jaguar Foundation which released, also in the summer of 2022, the ‘Progressing Gender Representation in UK Dance Music’ report, in which it explores the gender disparity in the UK electronic music scene. If we only look at averages, however, we easily lose sight of the major differences and even outliers that do exist: whereas the Brussels-based Schiev is evenly distributed, the Dutch Dekmantel only has 24% female performers on its stage; Heroines of Sound in Berlin obviously has an almost 100% female and/or non-binary line-up. While the statistics provide impetus to map the extent of the problem, Bissi from the Brussels collective Missfitte wonders: ‘Where do you stop? When the balance hits 50%? The feminist issue is bound up with many other struggles. This is only the tip of the iceberg. It’s hard enough to reach a balance here, while there are many other problems we haven’t even touched.’ It is true that none of these reports consider the other ‘intersections’ that the collectives mentioned above are trying to highlight. What about the visibility of LGBTQIA+ artists and people of colour? To what extent does geographical origin play a role in the programming? And is there space on stage for people with a disability?
Rebellion in the night
Whereas the commercial clubs are often still miles away from the origins of the electronic dance scene, the fight for change and more diversity, equality and inclusion in society at large is a difficult one. That is why a new generation of queer feminist collectives have taken the initiative to create a nightlife especially for women, transgender people and gender nonconforming people in recent years. These collectives are not only found in Brussels, but all over the world: Burenhinder (Antwerp), Maricas (Barcelona), Mina (Lisbon), Oramics (Poland), Room4Resistance (Berlin), etc. Some collectives are more active and activist than others. Missfitte, founded by Noemi Cano, started organising its first events in 2018. In November 2019, the collective organised a debate evening on queer culture and the club scene. There the Brussels-based producer and DJ Sara Dziri explained the idea behind Not Your Techno, which had been founded half a year previously. That collective, which includes Yasmine Dammak, aims to develop into a community and platform that organises parties with diverse, upcoming talent on the electronic music scene ‘with a focus on female-identifying, queer and POC artists.’ Dammak: ‘We felt a need to bring some changes and improvements to the electronic music scene. The scene has been quite EU-centred, which was logical decades ago but is far from the reality nowadays. Belgium is becoming more diverse, and we need to implement this diversity in the electronic music scene too. We wanted to be part of to this evolution and therefore started our own community.’ Hence these collectives also work towards greater awareness among clubbers of the lack of diversity in (mainstream) clubs and the media. They do this both explicitly and implicitly: a casual visitor who knows nothing about the organisation and its aims may notice that the night feels different. Very slowly, these collectives have also begun to impact mainstream club culture. Dammak: ‘More and more organisations are reaching out to talk and organise events with us, in which our expertise considering safe.r spaces and inclusivity is implemented.’ Besides the work of these collectives, a specialised festival circuit is also taking shape. These festivals are organised by people from the LGBTQIA+ community and appeal to the same community. This creates a platform for queer artists, mainly in the electronic underground. In turn, a safe.r space is emerging where everyone can be themselves, without intruders or subjection to a heteronormative gaze. Whereas WHOLE | United Queer Festival has already been held four times, Body Movements, which had its second edition in the summer of 2022, is the first British queer and trans electronic music festival. Instead of having headline acts, the founders of Body Movements – event organiser Clayton Wright and DJ Saoirse, both members of the queer community – opted to work in partnership with queer collectives. That enabled them to create a diverse and authentic programme. More important still is that they want to reclaim queer events. After all, the British queer community is concerned to see many queer events in London being organised by companies run by heterosexuals.
Flesh Festival made its debut in 2022 as the first camping festival in London. It is the brainchild of Samantha Togni, an Italian living in London. Togni has been creating venues for some time that give a voice to all underrepresented and unrepresented groups in the music industry. In doing so, they pay attention to all genders, cultures and backgrounds that are still blatantly being ignored by the industry. As with Not Your Techno, the security team at their events is mainly female and queer. Dammak: ‘If we must provide the security team ourselves, the selection will be based on the audience. We believe that the representation of the audience influences the choice of our security team, which is queer, female-identifying, POC, etc.’ At Flesh Festival, ninety per cent of the line-up are women, transgender people and non-binary artists with a wide spectrum of ethnicities.
Positive signals?
The dance floor isn’t the only place where more diversity, equality and inclusion are needed. Radio stations and magazines are also in a sorry state. In 2020, I spoke to a PR manager (name known to the editor), who is responsible for marketing a handful of Belgian and foreign acts. He told me that the music programming at the Flemish broadcasting service, the VRT, was mainly done by male teams. ‘At Radio 1’, he added, ‘almost all of them are old men.’ That is not only the case for commercial and/or public broadcasters. The playlists of smaller radio stations (including internet radio) are also determined by a predominantly male team. Resident DJs are more often men than women. Recently, something seems to be changing on the radio landscape. For example, the Irish Dublin Digital Radio states in its mission statement: ‘We aim to provide a platform for voices that would otherwise be underrepresented or excluded in contemporary discussions.’ Refuge Worldwide in Berlin claims that it mainly wants to profile itself as a gender-balanced radio station with attention to minorities. If you look at the (online) radio community, the unique position of Radio Vacarme (French for ‘noise’), founded in 2021, is striking: This Brussels-based web radio station, set up by Chloé Pinaud, Winona Andujar, Delphine Tézé and Federica Grassi, broadcasting from Brasserie Illegaal, calls itself feminist and queer. Vacarme went online in February 2022 with an intense and diverse programme. It offers a safe.r space for artistic and cultural productions, debates on feminism, the LGBTQIA+ community and conversations about current social issues. Their selection of residents is also extremely diverse. With live shows, DJ sets, podcasts and talk radio, Radio Vacarme holds space for a highly diverse offering and audience.
Dissonant
In 2020, I set up my own online platform, Dissonant, after a career of more than twenty years as a journalist, curator and member of the editorial team at a music magazine. At that point, the magazine had two women in its core editorial team. It wasn’t always easy to find space for interesting, innovative female and queer artists in the magazine. A frequently heard comment – that I also regularly see cropping up elsewhere in the music scene, such as recently in an online debate on an all-male line-up at a punk festival – is that ‘it needs to be good, though’. Even in 2022, a double standard still applies, and gender stereotyping is ubiquitous in the music industry. What is more, this attitude is also typical of how knowledge about music is valued and transmitted within the music industry: anything outside the canon is not taken seriously. This approach can also be found in present-day music journalism. Dissonant is a reaction to that frustration. Although the platform is still in search of a format as a place for journalism, it has been a monthly radio show on Radio Vacarme since February 2022. I aim for my Dissonant show to hold space for women, LGBTQIA+ people, non-binary and other gender nonconforming producers in electronic music. For the time being, Dissonant is unique in the Belgian radio landscape, but fortunately there are like-minded online initiatives elsewhere in the world. For example, Feminatronic both creates a monthly playlist on Soundcloud and has a blog with a listening summary. Feminatronic expresses the intention ‘to celebrate the eclecticism of electronic artists who identify as female’. Female Frequencies is a DJ crew and collective, but also a radio show on reboot.fm in Berlin, which plays music by female, trans and non-binary producers. In Britain, jacki-e is fighting gender inequality in electronic music with her show ‘Draw The Line’. Radio Kamikaze, operating out of London, broadcasted a series of exclusively LGBTQIA+ artists in May.
Subtle changes?
On the eve of Pride 2022, the Ancienne Belgique in Brussel organised ‘Outrageous’, a festival evening deliberately aimed at queers, with only queer artists on stage. It was as though the concert promotors had only realised that evening that there was an audience thirsty for queer artists. ‘It’s a success. We were so worried no one would come’, I heard someone whisper to her partner. Other venues in Brussels have been aware that queers also want their own night for longer. Besides party concepts like Los Niños, Gay Haze and Cat Club, Queer Future Club made its debut at the end of 2019 with a programme of its own, at Fformatt which has since closed down. This summer, Paradise City Festival offered stage space to Rebel and Not Your Techno, and C12 has invited the DJ and LGBTQIA+ advocate Eris Drew to perform in autumn 2022. One thing is striking. Most of these organisations and concert venues are still run by a small, very homogeneous group of men at present. Diversity, equality and inclusion still cannot be taken for granted, but Yasmine Dammak is optimistic: ‘We feel things are moving. There is a little evolution considering booking women and trying to balance line-ups, but we need more recognition and visibility in the scene. There is still a lot of work to do.’ It will be good!
Thanks to Yasmine Dammak, Bissi and Zoé Devaux (Paradise City Festival) who shared the interview with Bissi from Missfitte with me. This interview was also part of Devaux’s thesis on queer feminist electronic nightlife. Thanks also to Ruth Timmermans for her extensive final editing of this article.
Disclaimer
The terms queer and LGBTQIA+ have been used alternately here. This is based on the wording that the collectives and festivals themselves use. Here the term queer is often used interchangeably with LGBTQIA+ as a general term.
Glossary
safe.r place: A safer space is a place where people can fully and comfortably participate without fear of being harassed or discriminated against because of their biological sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, cultural background, religious affiliation, age, or physical or mental ability. Using the term safe.r space reflects the fact that discrimination and harassment can occur even in spaces where norms, policies, and procedures have been put in place to prevent such behaviour. No space can ever be 100% safe for all people because everyone’s requirements to feel safe are different, hence safe.r space.
POC: People of Colour.
This article was written in the summer of 2022 for the publication ‘Curating Diversity’ by, amongst others, Musica Impulscentrum. The publication was made public in November 2022 and can be consulted on the website of Musica Impulscentrum.