Performance as Intravention

Ballroom Culture and the Politics of HIV/Aids in Detroit

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4272014
AutoresM Bailey (0000-0003-0016-7161, autor de correspondencia), Marlon M Bailey
Año2009
Volumen11
Número3
Páginas253-274
Fecha de publicación2009-09-08
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSouls (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1099-9949 • E-ISSN: 1548-3843
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10999940903088226
OpenAlexW2149700175
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas34

After twenty-six years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the disease's impact on people of African descent throughout the world has been devastating. This essay draws from performance ethnographic research on Ballroom culture and HIV/AIDS in Detroit, Michigan. Ballroom culture is a Black and Latina/o queer community in North America. In this examination, I delineate how Black queer members of the Ballroom community create and engage in HIV/AIDS prevention strategies through performance. I argue that Ballroom community members deploy forms of intravention, strategies for HIV/AIDS prevention that are created by and emerge from within the Ballroom community, a so-called "high risk community." Keywords: At-risk communitiesballroom cultureBlack MSMcommunities of supportHIV/AIDSintraventionperformanceprevention ballsstigmatization Notes I interviewed Wolfgang Busch on November 30, 2003 in New York City. His film, How Do I Look (2006), is the most recent documentary on Ballroom culture in NYC. During the interview, Wolfgang said that he wants the proceeds from the film to be dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention. For more information and updates on his work go to http://www.howdoilooknyc.org Cathy Cohen, "Deviance as Resistance: a New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics," Du Bois Review 1, no. (2004): 27-45, 27. This chant by Neiman Marcus Escada is taken from a CD of house music mixes called Bamabounce. Currently, the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) has the longest standing HIV/AIDS prevention program that focuses on the Ballroom community. The House of Latex of the GMHC has held its annual Latex Ball (an HIV/AIDS prevention ball) for eighteen years. The Latex Ball is by far the most popular ball in the country, usually drawing between 2,500 and 3,000 audience members/participants. Ironically, the CDC does not recognize this program as an intervention, and it is not federally funded. Performance or performative ethnography is a method of data collection that requires the researcher to actively participate in the very performances and cultural practices that he or 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 are analyzed. More discussion on performance ethnography can be found in D. Soyini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2005), Norman K. Denzin, Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2003), and E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). Samuel Friedman, Melissa Bolyard, Carey Maslow, Pedro Mateu-Gelabert, Alan Neaigus, and Milagros Sandoval, "Urging Others to Be Healthy: 'Intravention' by Injection Drug Users as a Community Prevention Goal," AIDS Education and Prevention 16, no. 3 (2004): 250-263, at 251. Ibid. E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 8. In 2003, I worked for Men of Color Motivational Group Inc. (MOC) in Detroit, Michigan. MOC had a CDC-funded program that emphasized HIV/AIDS prevention among the Ballroom community. The program lost its funding, and the organization eventually closed in the midst of controversy. For more information, see Brent Dorian Carpenter, "Sexual Harassment Allegations Rock Men of Color: Funding Could Be at Risk," Between the Line (June 2003), 12-18. It is worth noting that most qualitative studies that are conducted on HIV/AIDS within public health are not ethnographic. In my experience working with and among other HIV/AIDS researchers, I am usually the only ethnographer involved in any given research project. 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, 276-296 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), 278. 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, 28. Ki Namaste, "The Everyday Bisexual as Problematic: Research Methods Beyond Monosexism," in Inside the Academy and Out: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies and Social Action, ed. Janice L. Ristock and Catherine G. Taylor, 110-135 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 113. 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, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2006), xii. 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 (Summer 2002): 145-156, at 145. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 45. Ibid. David Román, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (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, 17-30 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 27. Cindy Patton, Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 23. Grover, "AIDS: Keywords," 27. Dwight Conquergood, "Of Caravans and Carnivals: Performance Studies in Motion," The Drama Review 39, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 137-141, at 138. Román, Acts of Intervention, 155. Friedman et al., "Urging Others to Be Healthy," 250. Ibid., 260. 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), 208-227, at 208. 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 system 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, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 78-84. Emily Arnold and Marlon M. Bailey, "Constructing Home and Family: How the Ballroom Community Supports African American GLBTQ Youth in the Face of HIV/AIDS," Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services: Issues in Practice, Policy, & Research (Summer 2009): 1-34, at 6. 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, at 44. While I acknowledge the participation of Latina/o queer people in Ballroom culture in some locations, most Ballroom members are Black queer people. Since my primary site of examination is Detroit, where the Ballroom scene is almost exclusively Black, all of my interlocutors and the communities to whom I refer are Black queer people. Brett C. Stockdill, Activism Against AIDS: At the Intersections of Sexuality, Race, Gender, and Class (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 4. All statistics cited here are from the Michigan Department of Community Health (2008), www.michigan.gov/mdch. In a five-city study of HIV infection among Black MSM conducted by the CDC in 2005, it was estimated that 46 percent of Black MSM are infected with HIV/AIDS, and 64 percent of those who tested positive were unaware of their status. "HIV prevalence, unrecognized infection, and HIV testing among men who have sex with men-Five U.S. cities, June 2004-April 2005," Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 54: 597-601. One of the critical problems with the reporting of HIV epidemiological data by local health departments is that the data is not often disaggregated by race, gender, and "sexual risk categories." As a result, most of the data collected on the local level do not provide specific numbers on Black MSM. Michigan Department of Community Health (2008). U.S. Census (2000), www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html. Cathy J. Cohen, "Contested Membership: Black Gay Identities and the Politics of AIDS," in Queer Theory/Sociology, ed. Steven Seidman (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 372. Roy Cain, "Gay Identity Politics in Community-Based AIDS Organizations," in Ristock and Taylor, Inside the Academy and Out, 200. More elaboration on this can be found in Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness; Seidman, Queer Theory/Sociology; and Brett C. Stockdill, Activism Against AIDS: At the Intersections of Sexuality, Race, Gender, and Class (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2003). Lester K. Spence, "Uncovering Black Attitudes About Homosexuality and HIV/AIDS," paper presented at the 2005 National Conference of Black Political Scientists, Alexandria, Va., 1. Ibid., 6. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness, 70. Ibid. Ibid. Román, Acts of Intervention, xxiii. Nancy E. Stoller, Lessons from the Damned: Queers, Whores, and Junkies Respond to AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1998), 2. Cain, "Gay Identity Politics," 200. Stuart Hall, "What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent, 1-21 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), at 24. Friedman et al., "Urging Others to Be Healthy," 251. Kim D. Butler, "Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse," Diaspora 10, no. 2 (2001): 189-218, at 192. 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, 245-268 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 246. Noir Prestige died from complications of HIV/AIDS on May 4, 2005, in Detroit. In Ballroom culture, "realness" refers to a fundamental set of criteria for performance. These criteria have been a part of Ballroom culture throughout its more than five decades of existence. Realness requires strict adherence to certain performances, self-presentations, and embodiments that are believed to capture the authenticity of particular gender and sexual identities. I argue elsewhere that these criteria are established and function based on a schema of race and class that gives realness its discursive power in both the Ballroom scene as well as in society at large. Thus, the performance criteria for schoolboy realness and executive realness include not only "looking like" a schoolboy or an executive, but also performing gender as a man with normative masculinity that signifies "straight" sexuality. Cornel West, "Nihilism in Black America," in Dent, Black Popular Culture, 37-47, at 42. In Ballroom lingo, "snatching a trophy" means winning the category and being awarded a trophy and/or a cash prize. This is also called "slay and snatch: slaying the competitors and snatching the trophy." This annual ball is cosponsored by the House of Rodeo and the Minority AIDS Project in Los Angeles. 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, 162-184 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 163

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