‘Hit that perfect beat, boy’: Queer dance, Hi-NRG, and ephemerality in the AIDS crisis in Thatcher's Britain

This paper offers a queer reading of the emerging Hi-NRG subgenre in Britain in the 1980s and contends that the physical significance of the autonomous dancing queer body remains radically symbolic and critical in a period in which queer bodies, specifically those of gay men, were too often discriminately depicted in the context of anxiety and infection. Illuminated by the ideas of queer theorists (José Esteban Muñoz) and musicologists (Judith A. Peraino), this paper considers the ways in which queer dance and articulations of gay masculinities within Hi-NRG gesture towards spectrality and queer utopia in the early AIDS years in Britain.