Stepping onto the Pop Dance Floor

Abstract

The dance floor, as both physical and symbolic concept, has long served as a space of possibility and permissibility in pop music. As illustrated by recent moments in popular culture and entertainment, nuances of star identities are tested and reoriented on the dance floor within the individual and collective lenses of performer and spectator. Whether rendered on a concert stage, inside a futurist club, within a televised competition, or through an imagined space of cathartic escapism, the dance floor has stimulated the subversion of normative categories and the representation of constructs of gender identity and subjectivity. Queering the dance floor, even in fleeting performance, the women pop stars highlighted below offer themselves (and those around them) “a way of making perceptible presently uncommon senses in the interest of producing a/new commons and/or of proliferating the senses of a commons already in the making” (Keeling 2014, 153), which consequently manifests umbrella alliances and queer operating systems that interrogate the ideologies of the larger order.