Drugs, techno and the ecstasy of queer bodies

Abstract

In Cruising Utopia, José Muñoz writes that “drugs are a surplus that pushes one off course, no longer able to contribute labor power at the proper tempo” (2009, p. 154). Their pharmacology of unproductive time also interacts in a “synergistic/synaesthetic” manner (Reynolds, 2012, p. xxx) with the hypnotic upbeat tempos of electronic dance genres like disco, house or techno. In the club, drugs enhance sensations and draw bodies close together, all while sound penetrates the ear, turning it into an “erotic orifice” (Schafer, 2004, p. 9). Central to countercultural histories of sexual liberation (Florêncio, 2021; Race, 2009), the club is a temple of queer world-making, a laboratory carrying out experiments with a queerness-yet-to-come. In this speculative autotheoretical essay, I explore the ethics and political value—as well as political ambivalence—of drug-fuelled techniques of self-invention encountered in the queer club. At once pharmacological, sexual, and biopolitical, these modes of becoming-queer of bodies flooded by sound, drugs, and sexual pleasure allude to the possibility of kinds of subjectivity and social relations that resonate with a narcofeminist ethics and veer away from neoliberal regimes of identity and belonging.