Embodied techno-space: An auto-ethnography on affective citizenship in the techno electronic dance music scene

This study examines auto-ethnographical experience with bodily participation in spaces of techno electronic dance music (EDM). The article engages with how inner- and inter-corporeal lived experience in techno-space constructs affective citizenship on the very personal level of the participant-researcher. In this context, the article attends to the underexplored field of how affective citizenship is attained and valued along embodied knowledge of subcultural capital in the EDM scene. It particularly addresses its overlooked gendered/sexual and technologically mediated (e)motional body. Drawing on a feminist scholar-artist method, the article renders embodied encounters with techno-space through evocative vignettes that include affective writing, a drawing and introspective poetic revelation. This method aims to convey embodied knowledge of techno-space as creative transformative experience beyond conventional modes of retrospective narration. The article concludes with two key lived experiences of affective citizenship: first, at times the gendered/sexual and cyborgian body was mobilised into a state of emotionally shared publicness that co-produced techno-space. Second, (inter)actions in techno-space incited subcultural capital as a set of tacit knowledge assets (including affective, empathic and therapeutic qualities) to be accumulated over techno events and to be occasionally transferred to inclusive participation in the everyday life.