Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture

GenderjRacial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture Marlon M. Bailey KC Prestige, a butch queen (a gay man) and member of the Legendary House of Prestige's Detroit Chapter at the time, attended the Xstacy Ball in Chicago, along with Prestige members from the Richmond, Cleveland, and Philadelphia chapters during the July4th holiday in 2003. At 3 a.m. the venue where the Xstacy Ball was held was shut down, and the continuation of the ball was moved to an after-hours spot. When KC and his fellow house members stopped at a gas station on the south side of Chicago to pump gas, Prestige was approached by two men, one of whom hit him in the face and knocked him unconscious. Luckily for KC, his fellow house members, Rico Prestige and Father Alvernian, were at the gas station as well and came to his rescue.1 Rico fought the men, apparently while KC was unconscious, and one of them pistol-whipped him. Soon after, Father Alvernian grabbed a bat from Jaylen Prestige's car and hit one of the assailants in the head. The two men ran off, but they took KC's watch, necklace, T-shirt, and earrings, and a diamond ring from another Prestige member. This incident could have happened to anyone regardless of who they are or how they are interpellated. However, throughout my nearly ten years of research within ballroom communities and based on my own experiences growing up in Detroit, Michigan, I have learned that incidents similar to the one KC Prestige described are common for Black lesbian/ Feminist Studies37, no. 2 (Summer 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 365 366 Marlon M. Bailey gay/bisexual/transgender/queer (LGBTQ) people, especially in urban spaces. Many of my ballroom interlocutors expressed feeling particularly vulnerable to race, gender, and sexual violence because their queer gender and sexualities signal to a would-be assailant that queers can be robbed and beaten, even murdered, with impunity. My Black queer interlocutors overwhelmingly live in poor or working-class urban areas and consis tently negotiate violence and oppression as a part of the quotidian condi tions in which they are situated. These feelings of vulnerability are warranted given the wave of murders that have occurred recently, such as that of Black lesbian Sakia Gunn and transgender women such as Duanna Johnson, Rodney "Ebony" Whittaker, and LaTeisha Green, to name just a few. Poor or working-class Black queer people do not freely choose the neighborhoods or urban spaces in which they live and move; therefore, they must draw upon their creative resources to survive homophobic and transphobic violence. One of the more obvious strategies that members of the ballroom community deploy to withstand, negotiate, or avoid violence in the urban space is to travel together. In KC Prestige's case, members from his house— the ballroom family-like structure—came to his aid to fend off the assailants and prevent them from inflicting further violence and harm to his body perhaps saving his life. As the late Dorian Corey, a femme queen and icon of the ballroom community, suggests in Paris Is Burning (1990),2 a house is a gay gang. Members of a house often respond collectively both in the per formance competitions at balls and when fellow house members are con fronted with violence. Thus, houses battle in the streets when necessary as well as in the popularized performance competitions on the runway. Yet, how do individual ballroom members get through the day in an urban space, especially when they do not have the protection of their fellow ballroom members at the moment of impending danger? Another strategy, and thus the subject of this article, is to "work the body" through performance and the overall presentation of self. Black queer members of the ballroom community use performance to unmark themselves as gender and sexual nonconforming subjects. Unmarking oneself through performance or "passing" is a necessary strategy by which to avoid discrimi nation and violence in the urban space. As I discuss below, ballroom Marlon M. Bailey 367 members literally perform and present their bodies to make an impact on how they are "seen" in a society...