Last night a DJ queered my life : disrupting the mythologies of a popular media practice

Abstract

DJing is an important cultural practice that emerged in the United States in the 1970s. The development of its craft, techniques, and technologies over the past five decades has made DJing into a formidable performed cultural practice and art. The metaphors for a disc jockey, or DJ, are many: beat conductor, god, mastermind, and savior, to name a few. The popular perception of what a DJ does is exaggerated by overrepresented elements of a DJ performance, most notably scratching the sound source and utilizing studio production technique. I ask, if these standard conceptions of DJing are centered on the male figure of a DJ, what are the lived experiences of women and nonbinary DJs? This project examines queer and feminist DJ practice through ethnographic research with women and nonbinary DJs of color. From this research, I produced a 5-episode short form podcast series, From The Decks. The podcast format not only provides information about the various findings, it inserts the artists and their sounds into the research. Included in this thesis is the text of the interviews in their entirety so that the archive will have the in-depth detail of the cultural practice within the contemporary arena of media and communication.