Vogue For Your Life
For the ballroom
Pioneers, Icons, Legends, Statements, and Stars,
who are with us today
and those who should be with us today.
Vogue For Your Life: Connecting Radical Activism in Ballroom & Grounded Normativity in Indigenous Resurgence
Submitted by: Charlotte Carbone
Submitted on: December 10 2023
Submitted for: Critical Theory Seminar
Submitted to: Kathy Kiloh
Introduction
As I write this paper I am on the verge of leaving graduate school. I considered if I should write this paper at all and save myself the late nights, red eyes, and empty mugs. Why should I give more parts of myself to an institute pushing me out because of their decolonial inclusive values that are merely rhetoric? I am reminded of the only natural innate part of being an artist, and that is the constant, persistent, and insistent need to create. This is one of those creations that I feel compelled to complete because while I am disillusioned by the university’s politics of recognition and business-first-education-second operations, I am affirmed of the importance of my work as a queer racialized person in my respective communities including the Toronto ballroom scene. Through the graduate school readings of dead (and occasional Nazi) thinkers, I searched for threads of connection to my practice and found connections with Indigenous scholars Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Glen Coulthard, and Eve Tuck. I see conversations between ballroom’s relations to Western mainstream media, and Indigenous relations to colonial Canadian socio-political systems. Thanks to Simpson and Coulthard’s works, I reflect on ballroom as a site of critical theory in praxis. Ballroom is a blended example of Simpson’s embodied radical resurgence, Coulthard’s rejection of the politics of recognition, and Tuck’s desire-based research framework. Through ballroom history and case studies, I will hold in conversation ballroom’s radical activism and Indigenous radical resistance to explore our tools for freer futures. Similar to Indigenous Ancestors, ballroom ancestors “didn’t accumulate capital, they accumulated networks of meaningful, deep, fluid, intimate collective and individual relationships of trust”. These complex relationships sustain ballroom, despite the intense grabs by the mainstream media industry to take a piece of us for themselves, including my own mind-body-spirit and work in the capitalist art education industry.
A Need-To-Know History of Ballroom
Ballroom is a culture, community, and artform created by Black and Latinx queer and trans* people in 1960s New York City. In the 1920s, there were Harlem Drag Balls during The Harlem Renaissance (1920-1935). This localized arts and culture movement celebrated Black life including Black queerness which would influence the later formation of ballroom. In the 1960s, ballroom began to formalize with the creation of houses (hauses), tight knit chosen families who would compete at balls using their highest forms of artistic expression among the safety of peers. Balls included the competitive categories of performance (voguing), runway, and realness. Houses were essential not only for competing at balls, but for everyday wellbeing as queer racialized youth faced homophobia, transphobia, and estrangement from their biological families and broader society. Each house had a mother and/or father who helped provide food and shelter, and shared knowledge on sexual health, gender, and sexuality. The first generation of ballroom mothers - Crystal LaBeija, Avis Pendavis, Dorian Corey, Paris Dupree, Pepper LaBeija, Angie Xtravaganza - all lead their own houses. The first house was the House of LaBeija in 1968. These houses became pillars in the ballroom scene, acting as lighthouses for queer racialized youth looking for belonging. Integral to ballroom is Paris Dupree, the pioneer who created the dance style we know today as voguing. It is important to preserve the specific orality and vocabulary of ballroom history, so to quote surviving ballroom DJ David DePino speaking on Paris Dupree:
“At the club Footsteps on 2nd Avenue and 14th Street in New York City. Paris Dupree was there and a bunch of these Black queens were throwing shade at each other. Paris had a Vogue magazine in her bag, and while she was dancing she took it out, opened it up to a page where a model was posing, and then stopped in that pose on the beat. Then she turned to the next page and stopped in the new pose, again on the beat. Another queen came up and did another pose in front of Paris, and then Paris went in front of her and did another pose. This was all shade—they were trying to make a prettier pose than each other—and it soon caught on at the balls. At first they called it posing and then, because it started from Vogue magazine, they called it voguing.”
I look to Simpson’s work to link Indigenous queer normativity to ballroom’s origins, both allowing queer people “a meaningful way to live in the world that is consistent with [their] most intimate realities. The job of everyone else is not to direct or control that but to support [them]”.
In the 1990s ballroom gained mainstream visibility and popularity through the film Paris Is Burning and Madonna’s hit song Vogue. Meanwhile, ballroom was grieving their community’s losses due to the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic. The community did not passively accept the government's neglect and tolerance of homophobia, and organized direct actions such as AIDS benefit balls that functioned as cross-industry networking events to ally with influential figures such as Keith Haring, Kenny Sharpe, Iman and Naomi Campbell. The commitment to public and sexual health, especially HIV/AIDS awareness, continues today in ballroom with the grandfathered tradition of HIV/AIDS benefit balls that directly fund and connect local ballroom with community resources and services. In correlation with these mainstream breakthroughs, ballroom expanded beyond New York City and into other urban centers such as Toronto, Paris, and Tokyo. The work of local ballroom communities and the international dissemination of vogue media made way for this global expansion. However, with the ever increasing appetite for voguing, “visibility in commodity culture is in this sense a limited victory for gays who are welcome to be visible as consumer subjects but not as social subjects”. There was potential for personal and community gain in ascending to mainstream media visibility from the underground ballroom scene, but also the risk of “flattening out or, worse, erasing class-struggle nuances that originally brought it into formation”. Today, ballroom is a global phenom with community members of all lived experiences and identities, yet remains anchored around the key politics of Black queer and trans* lived experiences.
Ballroom’s queer trans* racialized community members, queer embodied practices, and complexly connected queer family structures are direct challenges, parodies, and deconstructions of the oppressive Western systems and biopower. For example, ballroom culture reveres, celebrates, and protects trans* women as integral community leaders, directly countering the triple oppressions of femmephobia, transphobia, and racism. Using a version of Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectionality framework inclusive of trans* identities and queer sexualities, ballroom combats multiple injustices with its persevering existence of more than 50 years. As I move to specific modern examples during my time in Toronto’s ballroom scene, I question how ballroom's embedded and embodied activism grows, maintains, and diminishes when decontextualized in mainstream spaces. Importantly, I look to Coulthard and Simpson’s ideas of Indigenous resurgence to speculate how ballroom and its activism can remain sovereign despite the grips of capitalist colonial forces within the entertainment industry. Ballroom itself is radical activism, a type of subcultural queer grounded normativity of experiential knowledge and reciprocal relationships.
Commodification of ballroom culture, aesthetics, and bodies:
Case Studies of Paris is Burning and Renaissance World Tour
Ballroom and voguing have made a post-2010 grand reintroduction into mainstream media through the TV shows POSE (2018-2021), Legendary (2020-2022), and discursively RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-present). Following in the footsteps of Madonna, voguing continues to be commodified by pop-music divas such as Meg Thee Stallion, Miley Cyrus, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and Ariana Grande. While it is argued commercialized voguing is to “pay homage to vogue as camp tradition” since these artists have a significant gay fanbase, I counter that this claim lacks nuanced understanding of ballroom history and is based in the fallacy of a universal gayness which is based in whiteness. The mainstream literature and limited scholarship on ballroom also lacks nuance due to positionality, as the published works that make it to the top of search results are often not written by the ballroom community. Ballroom has become the next subculture ripe for picking, it is the next “trend in producing colorful ethnicity for the white consumer appetite that makes it possible for blackness to be commodified in unprecedented ways”. If ballroom itself is a site of radical activism, when co-opted and commodified what integrity does this activism have and therefore the culture of ballroom maintain? How does commodification dilute or completely dissolve ballroom’s activism in order to meet the general public’s conservative palette? Even if ballroom’s activism has been reduced to a voyeuristic spectacle of performative slacktivism, can it still have positive effects for ballroom and queer racialized people outside of ballroom? Before I explore these questions with a critique of Beyonce’s Renaissance (2022), I go further back to the film Paris Is Burning (1990) which also exemplifies the complexities of ballroom documentation, dissemination, and exploitation by non-ballroom bodies.
The documentary Paris Is Burning was directed by Jennie Livingston, a white lesbian New Yorker with a BA from Yale University. The film provides outsiders an intimate look into New York City’s 1980 ballroom scene during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Through interviews with ballroom houses and fly-on-the-wall footage of balls, the documentary explores the lives, struggles, and aspirations of ballroom’s first leaders such as Dorian Corey and Willi Ninja. Despite its acclaim and continued circulation for ballroom education, Paris Is Burning has been widely criticized by ballroom descendants and Black scholars for the exploitation of poor queer racialized people. bell hooks critiques how Livingston “assumes a privileged location of innocence…the tender-hearted, mild-mannered, virtuous white woman daring to venture into a contemporary heart of darkness to bring back knowledge of the natives.” Livingston’s ignorance to her positionality as a white upper-middle class person dangerously assumes access to all intersections of queerness and dismisses the power dynamics between Black object and white subject established by the film. Majority of the cast has died, many due to HIV/AIDS complications including the film’s namesake Paris Dupree. As for Livingston, she is alive and currently developing her next film Earth Camp One. I look to Simpson who points out the “never-ending cycle of [Indigenous] victimhood, and Canadians in a never-ending cycle of self-congratulatory saviorhood” and see parallels with the power dynamics between ballroom communities’ victimhood and Western media’s saviourhood. Using Simpson’s perspective, Paris Is Burning can be seen as a self righteous distraction from the intersecting race-class power imbalance between Livingston and ballroom, in order to uphold white interests while feigning investment in the wellness of poor racialized people. The film does show the joy of ballroom in fleeting moments, but the murder of Venus Xtravaganza is a central plot point. To this, I call upon Tuck who condemns damage-centered research because it pathologizes, fetishizes, and exploits marginalized communities, as researchers leave “finger-shaped bruises on our pulse points” once they achieve their professional agendas. While Livingston’s film grossed $3.8 million in its debut and “legitimized ballroom” (to use her own words), the cast planned to sue for compensation proportional to the revenue but they never saw extra payment. The compromise of mainstream media is the potential “exploitation and mistreatment of people and material…the feelings of being overresearched yet, ironically, made invisible,” yet the film is solidified by the community as a watershed moment for ballroom’s growth.
In 2022 ballroom was again thrust into the general public’s consumption through Beyonce’s Renaissance which includes a studio length album, the Renaissance World Tour (RWT), and feature length film. The album’s songs sample ballroom’s Icon Kevin JZ Prodigy, Kevin Aviance, and signature voguing beats. The RWT features a few exceptional members of the ballroom community as backup dancers and choreography assistants. The film uses Prodigy’s recognizable voice to introduce “the iconic mother of the house Renaissance, Beyonce”. However, the house of Renaissance is not a haus and Beyonce is not an Icon. It is only in the fabricated Renaissance universe of Parkwood Entertainment that these contextual ballroom honorifics have been granted. When I hear these words, Icon and Motha ring hollow in their decontextualization and donning on the body of a billionaire, as I instead think of the ballroom Icons and Mothas who love, teach and inspire ballroom children. While Beyonce does share identities with ballroom community members as a Black woman, identity does not entitle people to access without due process. Cultural access is earned, maintained, and protected through careful gatekeeping. The term gatekeeping has been misconstrued into a modern buzzword for exclusion on any grounds, dangerously mutated to imply a selfish withholding of information. However, in the appropriate context gatekeeping is about the careful protection and critical dissemination of sacred knowledge by marginalized cultures such as ballroom. In the context of Indigenous knowledge keeping, Simpson explains how some Indigenous artists “refuse to visibilize Indigenous intelligence or grounded normativity and therefore make it vulnerable to commodification and control by settler colonialism… It is an elegant level of protection and disruption.” In the context of ballroom, I speculate how we can protect our knowledge but still reach new queer racialized youth because it is often through mainstream glimpses that youth discover potential futures for themselves.
As the RWT continued to accrue the eventual total of $579 million, North American ballroom scenes were reeling from the outrageous murder of one of our own. O’shae Sibley was a member of the New York ballroom scene, specifically the House of Old Navy. On July 29 2023, Sibley was stabbed at a gas station in Brooklyn, New York. Sibley and his friends were playing Beyonce’s Renaissance and Sibley vogued to the music as his friends filled up the car. A group of men confronted Sibley and his friends, commanding them to stop dancing and shouting homophobic slurs. One of the men stabbed Sibley in the chest and fled the scene. Sibley was taken to Maimonides Medical Center but pronounced dead on arrival. Meanwhile, that same night Beyonce performed at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, a mere 50 minute drive away from Sibley. Sibley was honoured 5 days later on Beyonce’s website homepage with text that read “Rest in Power O’Shea Sibley”. I remain unmoved by this tribute, as rhetoric does not revive gay Black lives, and rhetoric alone does not protect them either. I look to Coulthard to understand the neutral reactivity instead of radical proactivity that bodies of power use as “the politics of recognition in its contemporary liberal form promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power.” I shift this Indigenous understanding of colonial systems to a ballroom context, as a way of seeing Western culture industries as an arm of state power that attempt to coax and contain ballroom politics with strategic lettings of condolences and solidarity statements. Meanwhile, ballroom communities quickly mobilized into localized actions after the news of Sibley’s murder, demanding justice and grieving collectively by voguing at gas stations together. It was a harsh reminder how ballroom is celebrated one moment, then villainized the next. Coulthard’s politics of recognition could argue that full ballroom sovereignty requires ballroom separatism from state powers which in this case are mainstream media. But I keep coming back to queer youth, and how their first point of access to ballroom is often mainstream media. How do we reconcile wide outreach to the most vulnerable with the exploitation by the powerful, as ballroom is commonly casted as the faces of queer spectacles but less often the directors, creators, and producers of them?
The quick and wide dissemination of voguing through Renaissance has attracted new bodies to ballroom, specifically dancers who seek to add voguing to their professional repertoire. Voguing was not always in vogue though, even within queer communities, exemplified by a 1980s gay bar which posted a sign reading No Voguing, recalls Icon Jack Mizrahi. With the performance industry’s renewed interest in voguing, the desirability politics have swung the other way as dancers skim off the top of ballroom, effectively mocking the vogue dance style and diminishing ballroom culture to only a spectacle. The term noguing has been coined by the ballroom community to describe people who appropriate voguing without rights of passage in ballroom or contribution to community. This includes dancers, teachers, and choreographers who transplant vogue elements into their work. For example, ballroom community member Gravity Jacobs calls out this extraction in an episode of the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race which featured “the most egregious and blatant example of the show’s unrelenting efforts to bastardise and make a mockery of vogue and ballroom, from terminology to technique and framing”. I look to Coulthard’s Indigenous application of Marx to understand noguing as an example of cultural dispossession, with the increasing separation between ballroom community workers and ballroom cultural production. I question the boundaries that separate allyship and membership, amplifiers and appropriators, in ballroom. I question if this cycle between mainstream and underground, between global recruitment and protective hibernation will continue or be disrupted in future ballroom cultures. While the innate activism of ballroom continues despite the phenom of noguing, it is still damaging to ballroom because it removes the heart of the culture during an era of misinformation, poor media literacy, and wars on Black queer trans* lives.
In Conclusion In Speculation About Radical Ballroom Futures
Critiques of Paris Is Burning and Renaissance are essential in imagining and manifesting ballroom futures that remain innately radical. It is not a matter of the pendulum swinging back to mainstream rejection and anonymity, but creating a constellation of ballroom media that “celebrates our survivance” and “recognizes desires as multiplicitous” instead of centering profitability and spectacle. Part of ballroom’s survivance is to ensure that radical activism does not detach when voguing is utilized outside of ballroom, and this means holding bodies of power accountable who walk up to our communities looking for knowledge. I turn to Simpson who recognizes “the powerful relationships queer bodies house— consent, diversity, variance, spiritual power, community, respect, reciprocity, love, attachment”, the embodied knowledge systems that anchor ballroom. Mainstream ballroom media opens up opportunities for neo-liberal co-option, but it also allows the next generation of ballroom kids like myself to find belonging where belonging is scarce in their local spheres. I think of the first time I saw Icon Leiomy Maldonado in 2009 on the dance competition show America’s Best Dance Crew with her ad-hoc crew Vogue Evolution - my first introduction to voguing. Yet again, though justice is owed to the portrayal of ballroom by mainstream media, a closeted racialized kid trapped by a white conservative family caught a glimpse of a queer trans* future. Sometimes these glimpses are enough to save young racialized queer trans* lives by letting them know there is a place where they are valued, loved, and fiercely protected - ballroom. I agree with Simpson that “resurgence is not a process that can come from any one person or any single set of ideas” and requires community alignment on intentions, values, and strategies for securing sovereign futures. For example, ballroom resurgence could include this paper, as I share enough but not all of ballroom’s understandings as the goal is to critically connect not deeply extract ballroom for the outside. The queer racialized grounded normativity of ballroom can never be fully captured in mainstream media or institutional spaces, similar Simpson’s description of how “one does not become educated within Indigenous intelligence systems by reading books or obtaining degrees” but rather you simply live, breath, and embody the culture. With Simpson’s perspective in mind, there is an irony in writing this paper for institutional assessment. Ballroom doesn’t need convincing of our own power, we have always felt it. I do this work though because this is the small resurgence I can offer for ballroom survivance. I end this paper with Icon Twiggy Pucci Garçon’s visions, “for Ballroom to continue to be self-sustaining…I want Ballroom to continue to be Ballroom” with hope that we live up to these words.
Gratitude and love to my kiki ballroom family, friends, and mentors.
Dynasty 007
Sage 007
Nofil 007
Krackle 007
Drama 007
King Louboutin
Lovely Imperium
Valentine Imperium
Solar Imperium
Legendary Senbo Old Navy
Sunshine Old Navy
Notis Poseida
Amethyst Poseida
Renee Poseida
Skittlez Poseida
Legendary Maldita Siriano
Legendary Bambam Siriano
Diva Siriano
Milkshake Versace
Chatzipapatheodoridis, Constantine. “Strike a Pose, Forever: The Legacy of Vogue and Its Re-Contextualization in Contemporary Camp Performances.” European Journal of American Studies 11, no. 3 (2017).https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.11771.
Clark, Ashley. “Burning down the House: Why the Debate over Paris Is Burning Rages On.” The Guardian, June 24, 2015, sec. Film.https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/24/burning-down-the-house-debate-paris-is-burning.
Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, UNITED STATES: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculocad-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1793913.
Criales-Unzueta, José. “From Underground Subculture to Global Phenomenon: An Oral History of Ballroom Within Mainstream Culture | Vogue.” Vogue, June 28, 2023.https://www.vogue.com/article/oral-history-ballroom-pride-2023.
Faguy, Ana. “Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour Brings In Half-Billion Dollars—But These Singers Made Even More.” Forbes, October 3, 2023.https://www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/2023/10/03/beyoncs-renaissance-tour-brings-in-half-billion-dollars-but-these-singers-made-even-more/.
Gravity Balmain Jacobs (@gravityjacobs), “Call me a hater all you want but the ‘voguing’ mini challenge in tomorrow’s [Drag Race] episode is probably the most egregious and blatant example” Instagram photo, March 9, 2023.
Hennessy, Rosemary. “Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture.” Cultural Critique, no. 29 (1994): 31–76.https://doi.org/10.2307/1354421.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2014.https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315743226.
Livingston, Jennie. “Jennie Livingston | About.” Accessed December 9, 2023.https://www.jennielivingston.com/about.
Klitgård, Mathias. “Family Time Gone Awry: Vogue Houses and Queer Repro-Generationality at the Intersection(s) of Race and Sexuality.” Debate Feminista 57 (February 4, 2019).https://doi.org/10.22201/cieg.2594066xe.2019.57.07.
Specter, Emma. “O’Shae Sibley Was Killed While Voguing at a Brooklyn Gas Station. Last Weekend, New Yorkers Rallied to Honor His Memory.” Vogue, August 7, 2023. https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/oshea-sibley-memorial-ball.
National Museum of African American History and Culture. “A Brief History of Voguing.”https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/brief-history-voguing.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis, United States: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculocad-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5047206.
Tuck, Eve. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3 (September 1, 2009):409–28.https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15.
Vadukul, Alex. “Mourners Pay Tribute to O’Shae Sibley at the Scene of His Murder.” The New York Times, August 6, 2023, sec. Style.https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/06/style/oshae-sibley-memorial-protest.html.
