I’ll get the obvious out of the way first. Yes, sure, Flo Rida’s party anthem “Welcome to My House” can absolutely be read as the invitation to a pretty cool party and night of sexual exploits that it is. There’s champagne and music and clothes on the floor.

But come on into my house. We can enjoy that reading of “Welcome to My House” while also acknowledging another level of meaning to which Flo Rida’s lyrics also invite us.

“My house” is the setting of an experience initially described by the speaker, a magic circle where the speaker defines what will happen there. The first line of the song is “Open up the champagne, pop!” with that pop at the end not a sound effect, but an onomatopoeia voiced by the speaker. This is an invitation into a world where the experience is built, not a previously existing reality. Later the speaker suggests that you “Close the blinds, let’s pretend that the time has changed” because this is a world where play and pretend are welcome and possible. Furthermore, the speaker suggests that these rules can run contrary to rules in the dominant culture. “Play that music too loud,” they repeat.

That magic circle is not entirely inscribed by the speaker, however. They invite “you,” the invited “baby” to make the rules as well. “Baby take control now,” the speaker suggests, as well as “mi casa es tu casa.” The house of the speaker is a place of play and shared control.

Speaking of play and shared control, Flo Rida’s ideological cousin Michel de Certeau suggests in The Practice of Everyday Life that there are ways for people use tactics that act against the oppression the dominant culture. Tactics are not revolutionary, and people are not acting overtly against the larger systems of oppression when they enact tactics; instead, they find ways of carving out their own meaning within those systems.

The consensual play-space of “my house” in “Welcome to My House” is an example of such a tactic. In “my house,” the speaker could easily act in dominance and dictate a set of rules. They don’t. Instead, they create a space that invites other voices to participate in the experience and creation of the shared world. “You” are not expected to follow the speaker’s rules; “you” are invited to come in and “take control” or to “yes and” the speaker’s world.

There is possibility and opportunity for us here. In the spaces where we have power, we often have monarchical tendencies, to make our own space. Our workplaces, our homes, our social structures are all spaces where we might exercise some level of influence and power. It’s a tactic, a way of acting against oppressive institutions, however, to turn those spaces into spaces where we share power and make-believe with those we welcome into our spaces. As a teacher, I invite students to “my house,” and though it would be much easier just to make the rules and enforce them, when I do so I am only reinscribing the dominant culture on my students. As a mom, it would be easier for me to demand obedience, instead of inviting my children into our own shared creative space. As a partner, it’s easier for me to perpetuate heteronormative, gendered discourse in my familial and romantic spaces, but it’s more liberatory to invite my partners to invent new modes of communication and behavior with me.

We all have different levels of freedom from which we operate within institutions; my femininity, my queerness, my cisgendered identity, and my whiteness all offer me a nuanced range of constraints and allowances within any given system. De Certeau’s idea of tactics, though, offers us the possibility of being able to act against institutions, even when we are still operating within them. Because “sometimes you gotta stay in.”