Event
Learn Your History: Ballroom, Femme Queen Performance, and Appropriation Today
4017 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA
For as long as house ball culture has been around, people have been appropriating it. Long recognized as a nexus of Black trans/queer diasporic performance, ballroom is home to a cluster of embodied practices and movement vocabularies popularly referred to as vogue. Over the past 40 years, vogue, and house ball culture more generally, has faced multiple waves of appropriation within popular culture in the 52 years since ballroom began with femme queens Crystal and Lottie founding the historic House of Labeija. From Madonna to Beyoncé, the appropriation of vogue and house ball culture remains a reliable strategy for pop stars to stay in vogue.
While the popularization of ballroom has multiple lives outside of house ball culture, it has also had a profound effect within house ball communities as well. From Leiomy Maldonado’s coining of the term “noguing” to RuPaul’s “death drop,” vogue’s choreographies have become fixed, decontextualized, and imitated with little relation to the practices of self-expression and ritual embodiment out of which voguing originated. This conversation will explore how the movement vocabularies of vogue have shapeshifted over the years, critically addressing the state of vogue performance, lineages of Black trans/queer life, and ballroom culture today.
This intergenerational discussion is part of an initiative highlighting how femme queens and trans feminine people in ballroom contribute to house ball culture as well as to popular culture writ large. The initiative will culminate with “Legends, Statements, and Stars,” a special issue for Transgender Studies Quarterly, co-edited by Victor Ultra-Omni, Noelle Deleon, and Eva Pensis. In the spirit of community-led scholarship and writing about ballroom, this conversation aims to recenter femme queens in conversations about vogue femme, ballroom culture’s appropriation(s), and issues facing Black trans and queer communities.
Featured Speakers
Niambi Stanley is a dancer-choreographer and historian who entered Philadelphia’s LGBT underground ballroom scene as a voguer at the age of 14. Having formally achieved “Icon” status within the ballroom scene, Niambi has won numerous trophies and been given multiple awards for her dedication, excellence, and contributions to the art of vogue. Niambi’s Ballroom House affiliations include: Guerlain, Jourdan, Karan, Ebony, Vittidini, and Prodigy over the course of 32 years. In 2015, Niambi dedicated her time and energy to protecting the culture of ballroom and educating people on ballroom history through her initiative, LearnYourHistory.
With her perspicacious knack for entrepreneurship, Niambi opened Trans-In-Formation in 2018 to be of service to her community through activism and advocacy. Given that Black trans women in recent years have been targets of hate crimes, violence, and murders across the country, being continually denied access to basic human rights, such as healthcare and housing, Niambi made it her mission to provide the most marginalized communities proper resources and skills necessary to survive and to speak about continued violence by creating a digital live talk show, titled “TransTalkTuesday,” which carves out much-needed space for education, insight, awareness, news, and resources impacting the trans community and beyond.
Eva Pensis is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar whose work explores the contours and legacies of transfeminine life and erotic labor within pop culture, nightlife economies, and entertainment industries. She is currently the Oral History Postdoctoral Fellow with the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program and Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Trans Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.