“If everybody went to balls and did less drugs, it’d be a fun world wouldn’t it?”

I have only seen Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary film Paris is Burning a handful of times and yet I can still vividly recall feeling incredibly envious and in awe of Pepper LaBeija’s conviction and poise as she approaches the doors of the Imperial Elks Lodge. LaBeija, who served as the mother or head of the legendary House of LaBeija for over thirty years, is adorned in a gold taffeta gown with oversized sequin puff sleeves, black accents, and an exaggerated bubble hem that gives the illusion that she is gliding across the ballroom floor. The audience, already engrossed by LaBeija’s performance, erupts as she carefully removes one of the puff sleeves and continues to strut to the beat of the music. The audience’s hooting, hollering, and gestating is reminiscent of the black church congregation. Instead of shouting refrains like “You better preach!” or “Talk to ‘em, pastor!” the ball attendees yell “You better work!” or “Alright, Ms. Pepper!” or “Yaassss!” Regardless of the differing contexts of these cries of adoration and affirmation, the sentiment remains the same; this is a sacred space that thrives on the collective spirit of those in the room and encourages one to express themselves in whatever way feels the most authentic. As such, it seems both a privilege and a kind of intrusion to be a spectator of a world whose initial obscurity seemed intentional.

Though drag balls found their start in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the ballroom culture we know today has origins in the 1960s and 70s in response to the racist ostracization experienced by black contestants. In an attempt to seek refuge from such harms and create an alternative ballroom scene that celebrated racial and ethnic diversity, black queens began to host their own balls. These balls consisted of a number of categories for contestants to walk in for the potential to win trophies and cash prizes. With the cultivation of a safer and more inclusive space, ballroom contestants felt free to push the boundaries of glamour and extravagance. Given this, it seems to be both an exciting and potentially dangerous endeavor to render such performances visible to those outside of black queer culture. Since the release of Paris is Burning, ballroom culture has only become more and more visible with the prominence of competition shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and Legendary (now discontinued) or fictional drama shows like Pose or AJ and the Queen. From Madonna’s 1990 hit song, “Vogue” to Beyoncé’s recent “Renaissance” album and world tour, the music industry has also shed light on the marvelous world of ballroom. On the one hand, this hypervisibility can be considered a reflection of the growing acceptance, admiration, and amplification of black queer culture. The innovation required to create and sustain such a world as ballroom is nothing short of artistic genius. As such, there is much to learn from the black queens who made space for themselves in a world that insisted on their exclusion. On the other hand, though, as with almost all black culture, this hypervisibility has rendered more insidious harms in which the cooptation of ballroom culture obfuscates the very figures it aims to spotlight. From women on social media captioning and commenting on photos with phrases like “The category is…” or “Gimme my 10s” to the integration of the ballroom hand gesture that denotes praise or approval that is now being misused by the dominant culture to indicate that someone is “clocking tea” or exposing hidden truths—which, I might add, is a phrase that also has origins in ballroom. This paradox of visibility has led me to question my own culpability in the obfuscation of ballroom culture. Yes, I am black and I am queer, but my experience of ballroom remains peripheral. I recognize that the world of ballroom was not necessarily made with my particular queerness in mind. That is not to say that my exposure to ballroom has not shaped my understanding of queerness in a meaningful way nor that ballroom is exclusive to black gay men or trans women. What I am suggesting is that those positionalities, and the unique experiences they render, played an essential role in making ballroom what it is today. To echo feminist standpoint theory, one’s social position informs what one can know and, in turn, what kinds of knowledge one can produce. In this case, the experiences of black and brown queer folks in twentieth century Harlem directly shaped ballroom culture and thus, should be foregrounded in our present-day understanding of ballroom culture. As such, despite my adjacency to the world of ballroom as a black non-binary femme, my consumption of ballroom culture can still lend itself to the harms of spectatorship and cooptation.

So I’m left to ponder the following questions: What significance has ballroom culture played in offering an alternative world for black and brown queers to inhabit and thrive in? How does the hypervisibility of ballroom culture alter the very structure of the world that it engenders? How do we, including some of us within the black or queer communities, negotiate the harms of coopting black queer cultural practices? Perhaps turning to Saidiya Hartman’s thoughts on improvisation can help us begin to answer these questions.

“A round of applause for nerve.”

Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a fearless attempt to illuminate the beauty of black queer life in early twentieth-century Philadelphia and New York by foraging for the unconventional modes of refusal available to black queer radicals at the time. She describes Wayward Lives as “an archive of the exorbitant, a dream book for existing otherwise […] that attends to beautiful experiments—to make living an art—undertaken by those often described as promiscuous, reckless, wild, and wayward.” As such, Wayward Lives is an endeavor to illuminate the aesthetic life possibilities of those not meant to survive. To do so, Hartman sits with the archives of several riotous black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals and points to these figures’ embodiments of refusal. She describes these figures’ practices of refusal as waywardness. According to Hartman, waywardness involves the articulation of one’s unmet needs coupled with one’s insistence on attempting to satisfy those needs through fugitive gestures. She identifies improvisation as one of the primary modes of implementing wayward practice into one’s daily life. Improvisation, for Hartman, consists of collaborative aesthetic practices that generate new possibilities for existence not entirely determined by the brutality of anti-blackness. Examples of such gestures include the prevalence of buffet flats or pussy parties where queer black folks could dance with one another without the threat of the white heteronormative gaze. Or the Lowell Cottage noise riot at the Bedford Hills women’s correctional facility in which black and white women alike refused institutional attempts to stifle their longing for interracial queer love. As such, improvisation, as a kind of wayward practice, involves the refusal of oppressive life conditions and the creation of alternative possibilities for subsistence and prosperity. It is, as Hartman describes it, evidence of the ardent desire to live or, to echo the late emcee, Junior LaBeija, an expression of real nerve. In this vein, I argue that ballroom culture, as an aesthetic, communal, and generative practice, is a pertinent contemporary example of Hartman’s improvisation.

“You have space to do all that you intend to.”

Ballroom, itself, is an aesthetic endeavor. From creating and curating different outfits for each category, to walking the ball with a particular style and flair, to the chorus of refrains from the audience members and emcee’s, ballroom is a space in which artistic expression is center stage. The most noteworthy example of the aesthetic nature of ballroom is voguing. Voguing is a fierce and unique style of dance in which contestants strike several different poses in an abrupt and swift manner. It was first performed by Paris Dupree, the first mother of the House of Dupree, in a night club when she and other black queens were throwing shade, or subtly insulting each other, through dance. While dancing, Dupree opened a Vogue magazine she had in her bag, turned to a page of a model posing and mirrored the pose. She flipped to another page, and copied that pose, all to the beat of the music. From then on, this sharp and zealous movement became a distinct attribute of ballroom culture. It evolved to include miraculous contortions of the body that, initially, few could emulate. As an artform that reimagines the possibilities of dance and choreography, I consider voguing, to use Hartman’s language, to be an improvised call to freedom. Voguing, for black queens in particular—whose bodies and forms of gender expression are still under constant ridicule, surveillance, and objectification—offers an aesthetic expression of a shared dream to not be relegated to the peripheries of society. Each angular movement framing the face, each dramatic drop to the floor, and each slice of the air “[is] a rehearsal for escape… [and] an inquiry about how to live when the future was foreclosed.” As such, voguing is an aesthetic endeavor that insists on not only one’s survival but also one’s ability to thrive in a world that wishes to extinguish their light.

“It’s not just the winning, it’s the giving, too.”

Ballroom, as a liberating aesthetic practice, is also a communal endeavor. This aspect of ballroom culture might seem obvious given the exchange of entertainment and adoration between the contestants and the audience. It is even more apparent in the different houses that hosted and walked in the balls. Ballroom houses originated in 1972 when Crystal LaBeija, one of the few black queens to gain recognition at predominantly white drag balls, grew tired of the anti-black discrimination and bias she experienced and decided to co-host one of the first black balls with Harlem drag queen, Lottie. LaBeija’s participation in the ball was contingent on her being the center of attention which led to Lottie’s suggestion that they co-organize a group to walk in the ball under LaBeija’s name. Thus, the House of LaBeija was born going on to produce legends like Pepper and Junior LaBeija, who were both featured in Livingston’s film and continue to inspire black and brown queens today. Ballroom houses do much more than provide a group with which to perform. They mirror families in that the heads of the houses are considered Mothers, and sometimes Fathers. As leaders of the house, Mothers and Fathers offer practical, emotional, and financial support to their children who, more likely than not, have been ostracized from their biological families and are in search of an uplifting and safe community to sustain them. In supporting one another both on and off the ballroom floor, houses mirror the aesthetic collaboration that Hartman highlights in Wayward Lives. She writes that, for 20th century black queer radicals in New York and Philadelphia, “survival required acts of collaboration and genius” in which mutual creativity was essential for sustaining life amidst so much death. Given this, I maintain that the communal aspect of ballroom, as it appears in both the formation of houses and the sacred exchange between contestants and audience members, is a contemporary example of improvisation where “an everyday choreography of the possible” can unfold.

“You can become anything and do anything right here, right now. And it won’t be questioned.”

Finally, ballroom, as a communal aesthetic practice, assists in generating new possibilities for existence. This inventive nature of ballroom is most salient in the testimonies of ballroom participants. In Paris is Burning, many of the queen interviewees share sentiments of ballroom being an entirely different world that fosters their authentic self-expression. In describing the importance of ballroom, a queer of color, referencing Lewis Caroll’s seminal novel, likens their experience of ballroom to stepping through the looking glass and entering an entirely new world in which they feel “100% right.” In the following scene, a group of black and brown queens echo this conception of ballroom and further describe it as a world in which they get access to an alternative reality of fame, respect, and adoration. Later in the film, Dorian Corey, a legendary black queen in the drag and ballroom worlds and founding mother of the House of Corey, offers a poignant articulation of the limited possibilities available to black queer folks in the U.S. and states that ballroom is a world in which there are endless possibilities for who or what one can be. So though one is not a business executive, for example, one can walk in a ball in the Executive Realness category, dressed to the nines and look and feel like an executive. It is as if saying to the dominant world, “If given the opportunity, I would make a great executive. And I know you don’t think so, but quite frankly, I don’t care.” I see this alternative world making as a practice of refusal that rejects the imposed life conditions of black queer life and labors to create something else. And this collaborative and aesthetic labor, to use Corey’s words, offers a sense of fulfillment. As such, to use Hartman’s terms, I consider ballroom to be a kind of “cramped creation,” or the relentless practice of fashioning alternative possibilities when one’s material social conditions make it difficult to subsist. In this vein, what ballroom offers, as a contemporary example of waywardness, is “a queer resource of black survival” that teaches us how to live when we were never meant to survive.

“We have had everything taken from us and yet we have all learned how to survive.”

I recognize the importance of ballroom to lie in its embodiment of wayward improvisation by remaining an aesthetic, collaborative, and inventive gesture that has sustained black and brown queer folks in the U.S. for over half a century. Ballroom remains a cultural stepstone for those both within and outside of the black queer community. Since its exposure to popular culture, ballroom has made clear the importance of refusing the imposed limitations of black life and generating alternative possibilities of existence. Simultaneously, the visibility of ballroom culture to the dominant world has rendered certain vulnerabilities in which the ethos of ballroom gets obscured. I acknowledge this cooptation of black queer culture as a threat to the radical politics of refusal and survival that ballroom offers. In an attempt to further negotiate these harms, I turn to my own research as a potential starting point.

My current research investigates black feminist counter-historical writing practices as legitimate sources of knowledge production that refuse the limitations of the archive and offer alternative narratives of black being and liberation. I identify these black feminist writing practices as redressive narratives that tend to the lives and deaths of the enslaved and their descendants by daring to imagine black life not wholly determined by the rupture of chattel slavery. I find this notion of tending to our collective and personal archives to be useful as I try to negotiate the risks of coopting ballroom culture. Though not an entirely fleshed out idea yet, to tend to the figures of the past—and their reverberations in the present—is to approach their stories with care and curiosity. Inspired by the connection between Christina Sharpe’s concept of wake work and Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, tending is a form of engagement that sits with the silences of the archive, pays careful attention to their resonance within the afterlives of slavery, and forages for strategies of survival and viability, all in an attempt to tell a different story. Given this, perhaps a tender orientation toward ballroom culture—which (a.) spotlights the figures and experiences that continue to shape the world of ballroom, (b.) illuminates the radical politics that ballroom offers, and (c.) reckons with the paradox of visibility that both elucidates and obscures black queerness—can help mitigate the harms of cooptation. I offer this language of tending to ballroom culture, not as a prescription of how to completely eliminate the possibility of cooptation, but as a possible response to the harms of hypervisibility and an invitation for further inquiry. In assessing ballroom as a kind of wayward improvisation and considering the stakes of such a radical practice, I hope to have honored the lives and labors of the black queens that paved the way.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.

The post Tending to Ballroom: An Inquiry of Wayward Improvisation and Cultural Cooptation first appeared on Blog of the APA.