I’m really excited to share my latest publication, co-authored with Mark O’Brien. On the face of it, this article represents a bit of a departure from my sexuality research. In truth, as Micah Salkind’s excellent 2019 text, Do You Remember House? Chicago’s Queer of Color Undergrounds highlights, queer identities are a key foundation for contemporary dance music. More generally, the groups discussed at the heart of this piece are about challenging norms. As you dive in, you’ll the themes we engage with in this piece are actually very “me”. The subject matter also stems from my first academic publication way back in 2002/3 in Contemporary Issues in Law also with Mark, and was our first attempt to engage with some of these themes. That piece took a more rights-based approach and sought to document the history of these groups. My final year dissertation and touched on raves (as part of a Million harm theory exploration of law, drawing on the work of Joel Feinberg) and Mark had long researched travellers. So, at the age of 22, this was my first academic piece. In the years since, Mark and I have talked about the themes in that work and continued to be attracted to writing about these groups, re-visting what we said in that piece and doing some aspects better and with more rigour and to provide a more theorised and original contribution. The re-emergence of the groups in the media in recent years put these groups back on the radar, and COVID-19 exacerbated themes of how the law interacts with these groups. It was time to try and unpack what was going on. So, after twenty years (yikes!) we’ve put the old band back together and come back to these topics, hopefully with something original and significant to say.
Here’s our abstract to give you more of a flavour:
Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic once again brought into sharpened focus the contested relationships of marginalised groups in the criminal law sphere, and the liminal (re-)regulation of space. Over the course of the last four decades, the law has borne witness to an episodic yet regular intertwining of the fortunes of arguably two elements of Britain’s counterculture: ravers and travellers, specifically ‘new age’ travellers. The two groupings of peoples have had a long, complex and often uncomfortable and fractious relationship both with English law, and also its enforcement agencies. This is perhaps particularly evident in the criminal law provisions and sometimes questionable enforcement of the Public Order Act 1986 and the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, through to the social and environmental provisions of the Caravan Sites Act 1968, Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act 1990, and subsequent provisions.
Both the groupings of ravers and travellers have been faced with a series of legislative and administrative measures that, directly or indirectly, curtail or otherwise restrict their choices as to activities, lifestyles and behaviours. The article analyses how the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has led to some long-established legal and regulatory themes being once again played out in relation to these two counter-cultural groups.
Playlist
It seemed appropriate for an article like this to have a playlist to go with it. It also meant Mark and I had some fun coming up with these tracks (and reconciling our music tastes – I’m more of a house and trance guy and Mark is still an indie kid). We’ve tried to capture the spirit of the phenomena we discuss in our article with the playlist. You’ll get a feel for different styles (including a bit of techno, house, hard house, and some more ambient style sounds that will give you a customer ‘come down’ element (that also takes me back to a small come down room in the commercial club Gatecrasher at the start of the century – but there’s a story for another time).
Anyway, check out the playlist and let us know if we’ve missed any tracks that absolutely should be added – we’ll keep updating the tracklist.
In the course of producing the article, we also encountered a 2021 documentary that tells the story of Newcastle’s 90s rave scene. This is an aspect of the history of rave that is typically overlooked in the literature that has been produced and whilst recording all of that history was beyond the scope of our article, we do touch on some aspects (again, linking to more recent developments) but we thought readers might value sight of this full documentary released last year (2021) as an independent film by Susie Davies. It focuses on the rave scene that took place in the Ouseburn Valley – scene of major gentrification since. It’s called The Kick, The Snare, The Hat & A Clap. You can check it out below:
Law and Sexuality 