Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
wrong, people withdraw from the space, and thus help to preserve the character of the
place. The vibe may be inaccessible to groups of clubbers from the moment they walk
through the club's door. For example, Martin is a thirty-three-year-old, black Zimbab-
weanmale,whoworksasacarguardintheparkinglotoutsideJacks,andwhodescribes
how clubbers go about deciding on which one of two adjoining clubs to attend. “Some
of them, they just go. You hear them talking, but I don't answer them, I just watch them.
Then they go there, they say 'ah, no, this one is not good for us,' then you see them
coming out and going to Jacks. Some they go to Jacks and they don't feel comfortable.”
The vibe of a place provides a sense of belonging and inclusion (or feeling discon-
nected or excluded) but it does this in terms of action. Does the place allow the person
to behave and feel as they desire? From this perspective, the vibe can be defined as the
key or entry point to participation. As such, it allows us to shift from an analytics of be-
longing, which has defined the place identity literature, to an analytics of participation
that focuses on performance and the kinds of subjectivities that such authentic, socially
connected, and spatially appropriate forms of conduct occasion.
These affects do not just happen to people as they participate in social life. The main
point of our analysis has been to show that the affective potentialities of places, in their
channeling of action and subjectivity, are rendered into discourse which links affect,
thought, and action in ways that contribute to the constitution of places and their vibe.
The notion of the vibe helps participants to explain their conduct and account for the
kind of person they are being in specific situations. It allows people to accountably link
affect and thought in two modalities of conduct: their embodied participation in situ-
ations and their talk about it. It is this activity, rather than the concept of “the vibe” that
is of primary interest.
The Vibe and Practices of Gender Privilege at Jacks
The vibe has a gendered contour. We can detect the operations of privilege and power
from the perspective of affect and subjectivity. In this section, we provide an analysis of
genderprivilegeatJacks,apopularcocktail baranddanceclubinPietermaritzburg.Be-
cause the vibe at Jacks is constituted from the total situation, our analysis will consider
the gendered trajectories of participation from the perspective of the material design of
the place, the routines of conduct that constitute social life in the club, and the forms of
gendered subjectivity that the vibe constitutes.
Setting Up the Space
Jacks is an up-market cocktail bar geared toward a middle- to upper-class clientele. It
is part of a franchise brand that was launched in 2004, with the Pietermaritzburg fran-
