Racialized youth mobilities in European nightlife cultures: Negotiating belonging, distinction and exclusion in urban leisure

ABSTRACT

This article examines comparatively the modalities of mobility as they relate to the ethnic club scenes that have emerged as leisure contexts for ethnic minority youth in different European metropolitan centers. Based on a four-year ethnographic research project that collected data in ethnic minority queer and heteronormative nightlife scenes, the article presents findings from Paris, London and Berlin that point to diverse articulations through which mobilities matter and can be realized by racialized young people with migrant backgrounds when “going out.” However, what these differences simultaneously illuminate is the overarching importance of intersectional spatialized inequalities that are transformed in the context of neoliberal urban restructuring in metropolitan centers. Thus, moving through nighttime metropolitan city spaces is fraught with challenges that are themselves classed, racialized and gendered.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobility
• leisure
• racialization
• sexuality
• youth
• intersectionality

Acknowledgement

Research for this article was conducted in the context of the ERC Starting Grant Project “New Migrant Socialities: Ethnic Club Cultures in Urban Europe” (N° 200699 MIGRANT SOCIALITIES). The support of the European Research Council is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There is of course a growing body of literature that links transnationalism with questions of socio-economic mobility (Amelina & Vasilache, 2014; Faist, 2016; Weiß, 2005), and also literature that discusses cultural change in relation to transnational migration and diaspora (Appadurai, 1996).

2. The Black and queer historical roots of contemporary dance cultures in particularly US American nightclub scenes have been acknowledged in histories of club cultures (Garcia, 2014; Lawrence, 2004), but rarely taken on as a contemporary context of study (but see Buckland, 2002; Kosnick, 2008; Petzen, 2004).

3. This article does not afford the space to present the design of the study in detail, nor to discuss questions relating to validity, reliability and ethics. Detailed information on these topics can be found in Kosnick (2015b). A full ethics review of the project was conducted by the ERC executive agency in 2012.

4. The question of how women can inhabit and traverse public urban space has been a long-standing concern of feminist geography (Skeggs, 1999; Valentine, 2007).

5. Bourdieu’s understanding of “advanced societies” here also problematically follows older modernization paradigms that both contrast different (national) societies as if they could be treated as independent cases, and rank them according to a Western development logic.

6. Here used as a term to denote all non-normative sexual orientations and gender identities.

7. Meaning someone who identifies with the binary gender assigned at birth, as opposed to trans.

8. Or with the British Asian student circuit, which involves lower costs for participants, but is of course also class-selective.

9. During fieldwork in heteronormative nightlife environments, Cholia rarely encountered British Muslim women, and while she had less personal contact with male clubbers, Muslim men were certainly underrepresented among organizers of heteronormative club nights, who were almost exclusively male.

10. Name has been changed.

11. Fieldnote diary of Meltem Acartürk, 22/01/2010.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council under Grant number 200699.