Abstract
“What’s going on in the USA? George Bush got us in a disarray. We got soldiers in Baghdad; we should be fighting AIDS instead,” chanted Chicago ballroom commentator Neiman Marcus Escada.3 Usually spoken in front of a captive crowd of black queer members of the ballroom community during a ball, Escada’s words serve as an astute critique of both US imperialism in the name of “national security” and its unwillingness to take appropriately aggressive measures to curtail the spread of HIV/AIDS infection among black gender and sexual marginals locally and abroad. Consisting of black and Latina or Latino LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) people, ballroom culture is a minoritarian social sphere where performance, queer genders and sexualities, and kinship coalesce to create an alternative world. Thus within and through performance at balls, Neiman Marcus Escada contributes to the creation of a counterdiscourse of HIV/AIDS. This is but one example of the important role that performance plays within ballroom culture and how it is a part of a critical practice of survival in which many of the members of this community are engaged.
I see Ballroom as an artistic community that can connect with youth on issues of HIV/AIDS prevention, and the relationship between drugs and unsafe sex.1
—Wolfgang Busch, Filmmaker, How Do I Look
Despite the feelings of some in Black communities that we have been shamed by the immoral behavior of a small subset of community members, those some would label the underclass, scholars must take up the charge to highlight and detail the agency of those on the outside, those who through their acts of nonconformity choose outside status, at least temporarily.2
—Cathy J. Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance”
The house structure is geared specifically toward the ball scene (particularly in Detroit). As far as its purpose, houses provide a source of family nurturing that often times a lot of kids don’t get at home.
—Prada Escada from the House of Escada in Detroit
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Notes
Cathy J. Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” Du Bois Review 1, no. 1 (2004), 27–45.
Performance or performative ethnography is a method of data collection that requires that the researcher actively participate in the very performances and cultural practices that he/she is analyzing. Simply put, for the performance ethnographer, performance is the object and the method of study, as well as the theoretical framework through which the data is analyzed. More discussion on performance ethnography can be found in D. Soyini Madison’s Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005),
Norman K Denzin’s Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003),
and E. Patrick Johnson’s Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
Samuel Friedman et al., “Urging Others to be Healthy: ‘Intravention’ by Injection Drug Users as a Community Prevention Goal,” AIDS Education and Prevention 16, no. 3 (2004): 250–63.
E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (an Oral History) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 8.
Carlos Ulises Decena, “Surviving AIDS in an Uneven World: Latina/o Studies for a Brown Epidemic,” in A Companion to Latina/o Studies, ed. Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 276–96.
Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Cathy J. Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” Du Bois Review 1, no. 1 (2004): 27–45.
Ki Namaste, “The Everyday Bisexual as Problematic: Research Methods beyond Mono-sexism,” in Inside the Academy and Out: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies and Social Action, ed. Janice L. Ristock and Catherine G. Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 110–35.
D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera, “Performance Studies at the Intersections,” in The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies, ed. D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), xi–xxv.
For more elaboration on theories of performance and cultural formations and/or deployments of performance as resistance see José Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” The Drama Review 46, no. 2 (2002): 145–56.
Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 45.
David Román, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998);
Barbara Browning, Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998).
Jan Zita Grover, “AIDS: Keywords,” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Boston: MIT Press, 1998), 17–30.
Cindy Patton, Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 23.
Dwight Conquergood, “Of Caravans and Carnivals: Performance Studies in Motion,” The Drama Review 39, no. 4 (1995): 137–41.
Karen McCarthy Brown, “Mimesis in the Face of Fear: Femme Queens, Butch Queens, and Gender Play in the Houses of Greater Newark,” in Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion, ed. María Carla Sánchez and Linda Schlossberg (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 208–27.
What I call the “gender/sexual identity system” is typically called the “gender system” within ballroom culture. My outline of the six subjectivities within the system is drawn from my ethnographic data that include my attendance/participation in balls, my analysis of numerous ball flyers, and interviews that I conducted with members from all over the country over a nine year period. Despite a few discrepancies among different sectors of the community, the general components of the system are standard throughout the ballroom scene. The gender/sexual identity systems is separate but inextricably linked to the competitive categories that appear on ball flyers. At balls, competitive performance categories abound, but the gender and sexual identity system serves as the basis upon which the competitive categories are created. For an example and an analysis of a ball flyer/program, see David Valentine’s Imagining Transgender: an Ethnography of a Category (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 78–84.
Sel Julian Hwahng and Nuttbrock, “Sex Workers, Fem Queens, and Cross-Dressers: Differential Marginalizations and HIV Vulnerabilities among Three Ethnocultural Male-to-Female Transgender Communities in New York City,” Sexuality Research & Social Policy: Journal of NSRC 4, no. 4 (2007): 36–59.
Brett C. Stockdill, Activism against AIDS: At the Intersections of Sexuality, Race, Gender, and Class (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 4.
In a five city study of HIV infection among black MSM conducted by the CDC in 2005, it was estimated the 46 percent of black MSM are infected with HIV/AIDS and 64 percent of those who tested positive were unaware of their status. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “HIV Prevalence, Unrecognized Infection, and HIV Testing among Men Who Have Sex with Men—Five U.S. Cities,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 54 (2005): 597–601.
Cathy J. Cohen, “Contested Membership: Black Gay Identities and the Politics of AIDS,” in Queer Theory/Sociology, ed. Steven Seidman (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 372.
Roy Cain, “Gay Identity Politics in Community-Based AIDS Organizations,” in Inside the Academy and Out: Lesbian, Gay, Queer Studies and Social Action, ed. Janice L. Ristock and Catherine G. Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1998), 200.
More elaboration on this can be found in Cathy Cohen’s The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
Steven Seidman, ed., Queer Theory/Sociology (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996);
and Brett C. Stockdill, Activism Against AIDS: at the Intersections of Sexuality, Race, Gender, and Class (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2003).
Lester K. Spence, “Uncovering Black Attitudes about Homosexuality and HIV/AIDS” (paper presented at the National Conference of Black Political Scientist in Alexandria, Virginia, 2005, 1–30).
Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 70.
Nancy E. Stoller, Lessons from the Damned: Queers, Whores, and Junkies Respond to AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1998), 2.
Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 1–21.
Kim D. Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,” Diaspora 10, no. 2 (2001): 189–218.
Vinh-Kim Nguyen, “Uses and Pleasures: Sexual Modernity, HIV/AIDS and Confessional Technologies in a West African Metropolis,” in Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective, ed. Vincanne Adams and Stacy Leigh Pigg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 245–68.
Cornel West, “Nihilism in Black America,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 37–47.
Tim’m West, “Keepin’ It Real: Disidentification and Its Discontents,” in Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, ed. Harry J. Elam Jr. and Kennell Jackson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 162–84.
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© 2012 Shaka McGlotten and Dána-Ain Davis
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Bailey, M.M. (2012). Performance as Intravention. In: McGlotten, S., Davis, DA. (eds) Black Genders and Sexualities. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137077950_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137077950_15
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