Dr. Maren Hancock (aka Betti Forde) is a Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Wolverhampton where she researches and writes about the untold histories of FLINTA DJs. Maren has published widely on DJ culture and is currently co-editing the first academic collection on Canadian DJ culture, We Can Dance If We Want To: Canadian DJ Culture Turns Up, and completing a scholarly monograph focusing on the voices of FLINTA DJs in Canada, Stereotypes: Canadian Women DJs Sound Off. Maren’s book Lady Lazarus: Confronting Lydia Lunch was selected for the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame Museum and Library in Cleveland, OH. Maren has deejayed for twenty-five years, sharing stages with everyone from Frankie Knuckles to Cyndi Lauper. She records and performs with legendary electro-funk-rap group Stink Mitt and occasionally delves into production, releasing an official remix of Peaches' "Dick in the Air" with her side project #entertainment. Since 2013, Maren has co-owned Dialed-In DJs, a Toronto-based mobile DJ company specializing in non-cheesy music for weddings and events.

Maren Hancock, “‘Party. Participate. Protest’: Documenting the Success of Mobilise, a Queer, Accessible, Sober Silent Disco”
“MOBILISE is club culture for the queers; the butches, babs, femmes & thems. The gender benders, transcenders, the crips, fats and wheelers. The troublemakers, rule breakers, the faggots, dykes, and divas. The black, white, brown, yellow, technicolour dreamers” (Fatt Projects, “Mobilise Themifesto”, 2022).

This presentation incorporates vivid video and still imagery to illustrate an autoethnographic account of Mobilise, a “series of raucous, joyful and radical queer accessible sober social” silent discos (Fatt Projects, 2022) that culminated in a large-scale, co-devised public protest which spectacularly led the 2022 Birmingham UK Pride Parade. Mobilise was created by queer arts organization Fatt Projects in response to the demonstrated need “to empower people to dance, take up public space, feel confident, and celebrate themselves”, focusing “on centering trans, disbaled, fat, PoC and other marginalised queer bodies”. As Mobilise was a resounding success, this presentation is an early step in creating resources, including a digital guidebook, for other queer communities to use to produce Mobilise-type events.

This paper’s research design adopts an autoethnographic framework informed by my participation as a Mobilise Steering Group member. I interview key instigators including Fatt Projects’ creative director Adam Carver, aka Fatt Butcher, other Mobilise Steering Group members, and participants in both the silent discos and the Birmingham UK 2022 Pride Parade. I also draw on journalistic and social media accounts of the events, and written and verbal feedback from participants and parade watchers. My theoretical framework also incorporates “crip technoscience,” consisting of “practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world” (Hamraie & Fritsch, 2019, 1). I examine Mobilise’s success (and areas needing improvement) and how Mobilise not only confirms the necessity for new ways of congregating but provides a blueprint for doing so. Afterall, “at the club, we create worlds” (Gotkin, 2019, 5).