UC San Diego

Little research has been done on sober early morning raves, yet their mixture of neoliberal wellness ideology with club culture aesthetics make them a rich site of study for scholars interested in club cultures, neoliberalism, and contemporary culture. I examine the NYC-based Daybreaker, asking what ideological and aesthetic losses emerge in the move from original dance music club cultures – originating in queer and person of color (QPOC) communities – to Daybreaker. Through an analysis of Daybreaker videos, interviews with CEO Radha Agrawal, and literature on disco, techno, and rave, I argue that even as Daybreaker emphasizes community as a core value, it ultimately reneges on QPOC club culture’s ethics of community, which relied on practices that destabilized subjectivity and hierarchy in order to blur the boundaries between self and other. Rather, Daybreaker supports the production of neoliberal subjectivity and neoliberal and bio-moral configurations of hierarchy, upholding these boundaries. Linking QPOC club culture’s practices to queer failure and Afro-pessimist refusal, I show that Daybreaker’s support for neoliberal subjectivity and hierarchy amount to an emptying out of early club cultures’ subversive ideals, using aesthetics of resistance to promote submission into neoliberalism. I argue that by supporting neoliberalism and bio-morality, Daybreaker supports material and ideological systems that disproportionately harm queer people of color.