Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit by Marlon M. Bailey: an Analysis and Report
Final Project Paper
One of the most popular television shows among my age group today is Rupaul’s Drag Race. A reality television show, each season has a group of drag queens compete in various categories, with one person eliminated each week. In fact, this show is heavily inspired by ballroom culture: a system of gender and ritualized performance among Black LGBT individuals. This paper will discuss Detroit’s ballroom culture as described in Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit by Marlon M. Bailey. I will be discussing ballroom as a system of performance, and will discuss gender systems, family systems and houses, ritualized performance, HIV/AIDS, and modern drag in the ballroom culture of Detroit. I will cover in detail what goes into a traditional “ball”, including the ritualized dance and performance aspects, such as voguing.
Ballroom culture is a system of gender and ritualized performance founded by and for the Black LGBT community. According to Marlon Bailey, “Ballroom itself is a result of the collective efforts of its members to create a minoritarian sphere for those who are excluded from or marginalized within the majoritarian society. This minoritarian sphere enables individuals, houses, and sectors of the community to undertake a process of identity making and remaking, against pervasive notions of identity that are fixed and permanent” (Bailey, 47). By minoritarian sphere, Bailey means that, in ballroom culture, the minority becomes the majority, and holds the power, influence, and status that comes with it. In this case, the minority exists at the intersection of Blackness and queerness. In addition to its existence as a minoritarian sphere where Black queer people can feel safe and welcome, Ballroom is the product of found family and queer cultural labor that performs essential services for its members, services which Black LGBT people cannot find in a cisheteronormative, white-dominated society. In the Ballroom community, queer cultural labor often takes the form of performance, including “performance for individual and communal self-fashioning”, “performance as the construction of a minoritarian community”, and “performance as a critical and creative response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic” (Bailey, 17). This synonymous definition of performance and cultural labor shows that, while many of the actions taken by members of the Ballroom community are performative, they serve vital functions to the safety, emotional health, physical health, and autonomy of the Black LGBT community.
One aspect of performance as queer cultural labor in the Ballroom community is the gender system. According to Bailey, “gender and sexual performativity are significant aspects of the cultural work of constructing community” (Bailey, 33). In this way, gender in Ballroom culture is another type of performance, one that allows queer individuals to find validity in a found family, and to be admired for their identities where, outside of the minoritarian sphere of Ballroom, they would be harassed or hurt. There are six categories in Ballroom’s gender system, each of which implicitly points to sexuality as well. These six categories are Butch Queens Up in Drag, Femme Queens, Butches, Women, Men/Trade, and Butch Queens. Butch Queens Up in Drag are gay men who perform in drag but do not live as women or transition medically. Femme Queens and Butches are transgender women and men, respectively. Women are cisgender women, while Men/Trade are biological males who present masculine and are straight or nongay identified. Lastly, Butch Queens are gay or bisexual cisgender men.
One common question surrounding Ballroom culture is this: why does Ballroom culture have a different gender system than cisheteronormative broader culture? According to Bailey, there are two reasons. Firstly, Bailey says that “Ballroom members do not reject dominant gender norms entirely, nor do they desire to do so; rather, by revealing and exploiting the unstable and fluid nature of socially produced and performed gender categories, members forge more creative and expansive ways of living their gender and sexual lives” (Bailey, 35). This fluidity and creativity of expression is a cornerstone of Ballroom culture. Another important aspect of Ballroom’s gender system is the concept of “realness”. Just like other forms of queer cultural labor that the book discusses, gender is a form of communal performance labor in which “the community creates, recognizes, and confers legitimacy on particular performances of gender and sexual identity” (Bailey, 45). The performance of unique and celebrated gender and sexual identity within the Ballroom community validates Black queer individuals who are, in broader majoritarian spheres of daily life, forced to navigate violence and bigotry. In this way, gender performance is “a way for Ballroom members to refract the violence to which Black gender and sexual minorities are subjected” (Bailey, 24). Although “realness” in the Ballroom community is seemingly constructed through masculinity and femininity, Ballroom’s gender system consistently challenges cisheterosexual norms, allowing its members to experience a form of validity and belonging that they don’t experience in other aspects of daily life, such as in biological family or walking in the street.
Another aspect of Ballroom culture that grants Black queer individuals legitimacy and validity is its family system. According to Bailey, “Ballroom members challenge conventional notions of marriage, family, and kinship by revising the gender relations and redefining gendered labor within the kin unit” (Bailey, 24). Within this found family or kin unit, there are housemothers, who act as caretakers, nurturers, and comforters, and housefathers, who act as guides and supporters. Other members of the family act as surrogate siblings, godmothers, and distant relations. Together, this group constitutes a “house”. This revision of a standard family provides Black LGBT individuals with the care and sense of home that their biological families may not have. In this way, the family system in Ballroom culture is another type of performance. The term “performance” does not mean that the found family of Ballroom is fictional or lesser than; rather, the “performance” of family signifies that the Ballroom community is willing to shelter and provide space for individuals whose original families ostracized or didn’t accept them. Bailey describes the family system of Ballroom culture in this way: as “a labor of care, service, critique, and competition… effectively taking on the work of family and community that the larger Black society fails to do” (Bailey, 19). He defines this type of labor as “kin labor”, and emphasizes its importance to Ballroom as a whole. According to Bailey, there is no Ballroom culture without houses, and no houses without Ballroom.
Perhaps the most well-known aspect of Ballroom culture is the ball itself: a night of ritualized performance in which Black queer individuals compete on behalf of their houses in various categories, hoping to receive affirmation from the community, a cash prize, and prestige for their house. There are multiple elements that go into a ball, including the Grand House March, the category based performance, the commentator or master of ceremonies, the DJ, the judges, and the competing houses. I will focus, however, on the ritualized performance inherent in a ball. Similar to other aspects of Ballroom culture, balls confer “realness” onto their participants, providing a sense of validity and community that Black queer people would otherwise struggle to find. The categories of a ball themselves have to do with “realness”: with either portraying oneself as close to the established construct in the gender system that the category represents as possible, or with subverting the Ballroom gender system’s expectations in categories appropriately dubbed “realness with a twist”. According to Bailey, in a ball, “members of the Ballroom community draw on performance practices from throughout the African Diaspora to create an occasion and space in which to find social support, affirmation, competition, and critique” (Bailey, 26). Thus, the runway of a ball is a source of “realness” or affirmation.
In Butch Queens Up In Pumps, Bailey details two aspects of ritualized performance at balls. The first is walking the categories, the performative portrayal of specific gender aspects on the runway discussed in the previous paragraph. The second aspect of Ballroom ritualized performance is dance. The dance performance aspect of a ball is primarily centered around voguing: “a dance form that involves an engagement of the entire body in the performance, [with] picturesque hand and body movements that are most familiar to the public… [forming] the basis of vogue performance in Ballroom culture” (Bailey, 173). As a form of ritualized performance in Ballroom culture, vogue dance has specific elements, including duckwalks, catwalks, spins, dips, and hand performance. A dance system based on beat knowledge and syncopation, vogue initially “[incorporated] many of the dance and movement forms of the African diaspora… namely, break dancing, martial arts, and Capoeira” (Bailey, 173). As Ballroom culture developed, vogue progressed in tandem, creating two schools of dance: Old School Vogue and New School Vogue, which form the basis of the ritualized dance performance aspect of Ballroom culture.
The final aspect of queer cultural labor that the Ballroom community performs is its response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Statistically, the HIV/AIDS epidemic disproportionately affects the Black LGBT community; however, in terms of aid, health organizations confer far more financial and medical care to the white LGBT community, while placing the onus of blame on Black queer individuals. In Bailey’s words, this is an example of “intersectional marginalization”, a term that the author uses “to theorize the multiple and intersecting forms of marginalization and exclusion that Ballroom members endure” (Bailey, 186). In response, the Ballroom community provided intraventive aid to its community: aid that came from within the community and focused on real solutions instead of meaningless blame. Bailey defines the difference between interventive and intraventive aid extensively. In the author’s words, “intervention approaches are designed programmatically to facilitate individual behavioral change to reduce incidents and prevalence of HIV infection among targeted populations that have been cast as ‘high risk’” (Bailey, 204). Intervention is aid from outside organizations, often governmentally funded ones, and is a strategy that “[assumes] that populations claim little to no agency in their own daily health and well-being” (Bailey, 204). Contrary to the founding principles of the Ballroom community, interventive aid strips away autonomy and agency. In contrast, intraventive aid is a form of cultural labor taken on by the community, for the community, “based on their own knowledge and ingenuity, to contest, reduce, and survive the impact of HIV/AIDS on their own terms” (Bailey, 204). Numerous intraventive strategies are taken on by the Ballroom community, but one approach of note is the founding of prevention houses which, in turn, organize prevention balls.
Prevention houses are ballroom houses and kinship units that work with local public health agencies, and whose primary mission is to “develop and implement strategies for preventing HIV/AIDS… by fostering open and informed discussions about sex and advocating ‘safe-sex’ practices” (Bailey, 206). These houses are an extension of the kin labor that the Ballroom house community provides for its members, showing the care, understanding, and aid that governmental organizations lack towards the Black LGBT community. In addition to working with their members to produce a healthier environment, prevention houses also organize prevention balls, which are “designed to educate Ballroom members about healthy sexual practices and awareness, through the competitive performances at the balls” (Bailey, 210). Prevention houses and balls are just one facet of the immense intraventive work the Ballroom community takes on in the face of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In the face of multifaceted discrimination from health organizations and governmental aid programs, Black LGBT individuals have found new ways to keep their community safe, further demonstrating the influence of Ballroom culture on mental and physical health.
In Butch Queens Up in Pumps, Marlon M. Bailey describes the Ballroom culture of Detroit as a “minoritarian sphere, one that is inclusive, egalitarian, and fluid in some ways but exclusionary and hierarchical in others” (Bailey, 27). As a subculture, Ballroom provides the kin labor, validation, and identity-based autonomy to Black LGBT individuals that is lacking in cisheteronormative, white-dominated spaces. Through Ballroom houses, Black queer people receive a found family that accepts their gender and sexual identity while providing a sense of community and care. Balls provide validation and “realness” to performers, while encouraging the uniqueness and variety that comes with Ballroom’s gender system. The ritualized performance of both gender and vogue dance allow participants to showcase creativity and receive validation and support in exchange. In addition to Ballroom culture’s massive undertaking of kin and performance labor, prevention houses and balls intraventively combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic that disproportionately impacts the Black LGBT community. Ballroom culture is more than a performance subgenre or gathering of LGBT individuals; it is a community, subculture, and minoritarian sphere, where Black LGBT individuals can feel whole, safe, and validated. A unique epicenter of ritualized performance, Ballroom culture continues to inspire and influence popular culture to the present day, and exemplifies the power and strength of found family and performance labor.
Source: Bailey, Marlon M. Butch Queens up in Pumps. Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.
