‘No caps, no coconuts, no all-male groups’ … the regulation of Asians in London clubs.

Until now, British Asian popular music culture and leisure spaces have attracted little sociological investigation. This article redresses the lack of attention paid to this area by focusing on an ethnographic study of the ‘desi’ South Asian club scene in London. It explores the relationship between contemporary discourses of Asianness as they are constructed within an East London desi club space and made to matter through embodied social practices. Asian bodies are disciplined in the making of normative ethnic, gendered and sexual subjectivities, which demonstrates how discourses of difference create complex subjectivities and practices that theories of diaspora and cultural studies have not fully explored. It offers a rethinking of diasporic identities as lived and embodied experiences that are ambivalently constructed and performative projects, neither entirely resistant to white, dominant discourses nor wholly complicit with its existing norms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]