CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Tabidze, Maia |
|---|---|
| Title | When Dance Becomes Political: Georgian Rave Culture as the Site of Global and Local Construction of Politics |
| Summary | This thesis investigates the relationship between understandings of politics and rave culture in Georgia at international and local level. It looks into the social movement that emerged around rave culture in Tbilisi and relates it to the global process of Europeanization of the country. By examining the portrayal of this movement on international media and putting it into conversation with the local actors – ravers and leaders of the movement, the paper argues that the movement was mobilized by intentional framing of technologies of rave culture, namely, cultural style, music, drugs, dance, and club space, as political. The political agency of ravers emerged in relation to the inhumane drug policy that the Georgian state was actively using as a repressive mechanism at that time. Apart from the collective political mobilization, this thesis investigates individual and performative ways of doing cultural politics. The sexuality and body politics, that largely marked the movement and the culture as queer, defined political agency of ravers in confrontation to the society. This very struggle between the younger and older generations, so-called liberal and conservative parts of society over the “right to the body” has largely been articulated by international media. While these framings are not necessarily wrong, they have omitted and downplayed the importance of the collective struggle against the police state and reduced the agenda of the movement to cultural confrontation between different groups of society. This process has taken place in the global context of what is labeled as “post-Soviet” transformation of the country from “pre-European” to the European state. On the conceptual level, the construction of modern liberal subjectivity has been exclusively defined in lines with queer modernity and serving to uphold developmentalist vision of Georgia by Western media. While embracing modernity as a reference point, rave culture in Georgia has negotiated and contested the Eurocentric vision of the culture through its struggle for the drug policy. Despite this contestation on the practice and discourse level, the movement has been largely dependent on international media representation. Whilst confined to one case, the study informs how culture that has mostly been associated with escapism and hedonism can produce political activism. It can further be expanded into covering the wider geopolitical space of post-Socialism as well as in theorizing Europeanization and ideas of modernity beyond cultural politics. Key Words: politics, rave, social movements, cultural style, Europeanization, globalization, modernity, Liberalism, performativity, body politics, drug policy |
| Supervisor | Claudio Sopranzetti |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/tabidze_maia.pdf |
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