Jess Easter, "Shifting Ontology: Ballroom Culture as Means for Creating Spaces of Security for LGBTQIA+ People of Color"
How and why did drag as it is today, as a widespread cultural practice among many queer persons, develop? To answer these questions, we must first look at the places in which this culture was created. Drag ballrooms have a longstanding existence in large metropolitan areas, like New York City, Newark, and Philadelphia. Current drag culture also has deep roots in a history of queerphobia and racism in the United States, indeed why the practice was so prevalent in cities; these were places not only where marginalized people were left in the race to suburbia later on, but also where people could remain under the radar. Drag balls originally developed in the late 1800s, in large part due to the influence of William Dorsey Swann, a Black man who was born into slavery pre-civil war, in defiance to laws passed outlawing cross-dressing. He organized parties most commonly with other men who were formerly enslaved where they would crossdress and hold competitions. Although Black people had a huge part in the origin of drag and the creation of this safe(r) space for queer persons, the organized circuits themselves were racist in that though POC were allowed to participate, judges were always all White and POC never won any of the prizes. In response, Black and Latinx people formed their own balls, leading to the ballroom culture we see to this day, which offer safe(r) spaces to queer people, particularly queer people of color, beyond competition, through the creation of “houses” and “families.” By examining the places in which ballroom culture has emerged and evolved, we can ascertain that they have been formed in response to the political and socio-cultural imperatives in these locations, widespread racism and queerphobia, in ways so as to create physical spaces of safety, spirituality, and resistance.
Gabby Mahabeer, "Fluxy like Mango: Visualizing Gender and Sexual Fluidity in the Caribbean"
The term “queer” carries gendered, racialized, classed, and geographic privileges specifically rooted in white, middle and upper class citizens of the Global North. Because of its close association with whiteness and the economically privileged, Black scholars such as Audre Lorde, Rod Ferguson, and Angelique Nixon have called out Queer Studies for its inability to discuss queerness alongside an intersectional approach acknowledging oppressions and privileges based on race, gender, class, and religion. Furthermore, “queerness” traditionally functions as a notion of open identity— “coming out” and/or proudly sharing pronouns, wearing pins, or displaying flags. For these reasons and more, the term “queer” and notions of “queerness” do not always encompass the realities of working-class Afro-Caribbeans whose lives are marked by criminality; colonialisms; and changing economics, geographies, and sovereignties. In sum, “queerness” does not encompass relationalities and shifting sexual practices occurring in the Caribbean such as sex tourism, polygamy, and cohabitation.
Considering such limitations of queer theory, I develop a framework of fluxiness to encompass how spiritual and creative Afro-Caribbean practitioners use visual, sonic, embodied, and felt practices to reshape gender and sexuality as boundless, fluid, and experimental, illustrating how gender and sexuality in the Caribbean can be rearranged and/or recalibrated instantly and/or based on specific situations. Specifically, this presentation forms a visual and sonic archive of fluxiness drawing on visual arts and moments from dancehall music videos. I argue that fluxiness, or the state of being fluxy, is an embodied, affective, and spiritual way of challenging gender and sexual norms. In explicitly challenging heteronormativity, being fluxy teaches us how to imagine and create alternate possibilities and worlds amidst climate change, Indigenous erasure, land (dis)possession and other forms of domination.
Shannon Peifer, "Imagination and Play as Liberatory Resistance in Feminist Art"
Within feminist art, an ironic imagination allows for multiple, seemingly oppositional conceptions to be held simultaneously and introduces a playfulness that leaves space for joyful experimentation. In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway pushes against conceptual boundaries and dualisms to dream of a “blasphemy” that allows for a more politically productive space, admitting contradictory ideas without integrating them into a unified whole. In the same way, we can consider absurdity and ironic imagination in feminist art as resistance worth taking seriously.
This practice of blasphemy or ironic imagination allows for multiple, contradictory truths to exist and for more possibilities of the future to be considered. Can the works of feminist artists help us understand the necessity, effectiveness, and possible limitations of these practices as liberatory resistance?
I argue feminist artists who play on this tension and experiment with the boundaries of dualities are able to collapse normative structures and move beyond prescribed social truths. For example, Lorna Simpson’s “For the Sake of the Viewer” plays with the power structures of a gendered gaze through a fragmented performance of gender in Bio (1992) and She (1992). As Simpson commented on her early work in a recent New York Times interview, “It’s a question mark, rather than complete compliance” (Baquet 2024). Suzan Lori-Parks also plays with words and allows for absurdity in her work. By not allowing the audience to respectfully, politely observe with “a kind of amnesia toward the here and now of performance,” Parks’ “Venus” disrupts performance structures to force the audience into a physical participation of history in the present (Harrower 273). In both cases, ironic imagination acts as a resistance to completeness or simplification and offers a path through crisis that disrupts, rewrites, and reconfigures boundaries.
Baquet, Dean. “Lorna Simpson Is America’s Great Archivist.” The New York Times, 17 Oct. 2024. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/17/t-magazine/lorna-simpson-ebony-magazine-race-gender.html.
Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Manifestly Haraway, edited by Donna J. Haraway and Cary Wolfe, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, p. 0. Silverchair, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816650477.003.0001.
Harrower, Natalie. “Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre Ed. by Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (Review).” Modern Drama, vol. 41, no. 4, 1998, pp. 661–62.
Parks, Suzan-Lori. Venus. Dramatists Play Service Inc, 1998.
Wright, Beryl J., and Saidiya V. Hartman. Lorna Simpson: For the Sake of the Viewer. First Edition, Universe Pub, 1992.
