This is a scary moment in history. As the world moves away from peace and towards bigotry and nationalism, all of us are looking for the best ways to resist and to keep each other safe. The silver lining is that the present moment grants us an opportunity to form stronger bonds and communities that can turn the tides.

There are a lot of things we can do to move the world in a new direction—demonstration, communication, and direct action to name a few— but is raving one of them? Not automatically. The act of raving can only be political if it is made so explicitly. There are many ways to make this happen. Let’s consider two from my own experience of collective party organization along with their outcomes. We can find insight from these examples of what it means to build effective and useful practices of raving for resistance.

I helped organize two Japanese nightlife collectives— WAIFU and SLICK— that demonstrated how taking or not taking an explicit political stance can either lead to ongoing spaces of political resistance or move toward other less explicitly political goals like the pursuit of pleasure. 

WAIFU started in spring 2019. A friend of mine was DJing a women-only party and invited me down. I had heard that the party was not open to trans women, but my friend assured me it wouldn’t be an issue. Unfortunately, she was wrong. I was stopped at the door, there was a big scene, and my friend (a genuine hero) walked out two minutes before her set was due to start. A group of us bought drinks at a convenience store and drank them in a parking lot nearby, talking about what to do; we decided to do a counterparty. This became the first WAIFU.

At the time there were no spaces or events centered around queer and trans people in Tokyo (as opposed to cisgender gay people), so WAIFU became a key space for the community. From the beginning, WAIFU had a political stance, partly because it originated as a counteraction to a situation of exclusion, and a culture of openness, safety and antidiscrimination has carried forward. The collective has been active in working toward accessible club spaces, antiracist actions including advocating for immigrants and refugees in Japan, and organizing to end the genocide in Palestine. WAIFU represents a space of resistance, but not because it is a rave. It is a space of resistance because it started as a political act and has remained engaged in political projects for the six years we have been organizing parties.

The second collective I organized with had a similar political stance but chose to express that stance less explicitly and to remain comparatively apolitical, which in the long term caused the space to move away from overt kinds of political resistance. 

SLICK started during the pandemic, which in Japan meant closed borders (to people without Japanese passports only) but no lockdowns. Many clubs closed during this time and, as elsewhere, people were suffering after losing  access to their communities. We decided to throw a rave with the idea that people needed to see each other. For safety, we threw the party outdoors.

This space was indeed needed; I saw more people in tears at that first SLICK rave than at any party I’ve been to before or since. More parties followed, including raves at a quasi-autonomous space inside Narita International Airport. SLICK’s stance, like WAIFU’s, was anti-discriminatory, but this was very much limited to the party context. The party was the main goal. The end result was that the political focus of the party became diffused, and the space ended up more oriented toward pleasure and fun than toward resistance. This is fine, of course. Not every rave needs to be political. Pleasure and fun are important, and SLICK has played a key role in this area as the first explicitly sex-positive queer rave in Japan, and the first to have darkrooms (to my knowledge). But the different outcomes of SLICK and WAIFU show that if we want to build a space of political resistance, we must consistently demonstrate a political stance.

Ultimately, raves are about building collectives and community, whether they be spaces whose politics only center free expression or spaces that have a more specific political stance. Community building is necessary for collective action, but it’s not the end of the story. Once we have a community, what do we do with it and in it? What does the community allow and disallow? If you want to organize a space of political resistance, these answers must be clear:

First, organizers can write and display an  easily accessible set of principles or a manifesto. At WAIFU we have a simple policy posted at the door— no racism, no transphobia, etc— that people must agree to before entering. This is effective both because it makes the community’s position clear and because ravers become more conscious of these issues. What’s important is that community members know that people at a party are not just “customers” but part of a larger group agreeing to a set of principles. Resistance needs solidarity, and solidarity through community is exactly what raving, in its best possible form, can build.

From the side of the raver, resistance in the club context begins with choosing where to go. What are the ethics of the club or the party you’re attending? What is its political stance? Where is the money going, and who is getting paid? What kinds of people are in the party and how are they treated, both by those who run the space and those who are raving there? Are the organizers/promoters engaged in other kinds of action? Who are the people who run the space, if they are different? This is the first step. The second is about considering what happens at  the rave, how to support those who are there, and how to enforce the party’s principles. Finally, one can begin to move that solidarity inside the club into other spaces for political action outside of the club.

The political work of raving doesn’t stop with having a night out. It starts there.