Suburban vogue and other queer survival strategies

ABSTRACT

Vogue conjures many things: honed Black and Brown queer and trans bodies, queer space, and communal resistance to hostile worlds. It is rarely something associated with the suburbs, US or elsewhere. This article investigates how the international expansion of vogue leads to the raced and geographic specificity of suburban Sydney. It does this through an analysis of Slay Your Oppressor(s) (2016), a hybridized vogue-martial arts performance by Bhenji Ra, Kilia Tipa, and Davina Chor held in an outer-suburban shopping strip. My account of Slay and the queer cultural histories and formations it brings to the fore is framed by the racialization of Sydney’s suburbs that condition the dominant urban narrative of escape from suburban exclusion. I argue that Slay mines the realities of violence against non-normative Brown bodies while complicating notions of inclusion. The instrumentalization of vogue as a form of self-defence highlights the multiple dimensions of queer survival strategies, many of which are lost in the longstanding theoretical standoff between accounts of suburban normativity and urban antinormativity. Relays between international queer capitals such as New York, iconic dance and cultural forms such as vogue, and maligned spaces thought to be devoid of queerness such as suburban Sydney resolve through local understandings of queerness and race. This article argues that suburban vogue displaces certainties around gender, sexuality, family, resistance, and the models of inclusion/exclusion they traffic in.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer suburbia
• normativity
• racialization
• ethnicity
• violence
• inclusion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Lee Wallace, Jaya Keaney, and Luke Létourneau for comments, feedback, and guidance on earlier versions of this article. Thanks to Alifa Bandali and Sara Tomkins for their guidance and support. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful and generous comments.

Notes

1 Kilia Tipa attributes her 2016 performance in Slay under the name Koco Carey and as such I refer to her performance on the night using Carey.

2 Vogue was seen as the embodied form of various ball conventions, namely ‘reading’ and ‘throwing shade’. Importantly, Slay does not replicate the competitive quality of vogue but instead uses it as a form of community affirmation that is both queer and raced. For a description of the various cultural conventions that make up ball culture, see Bailey (2013). For an account of the gay scene in Harlem, see Hawkeswood (1996).

3 For more on this afterlife see Tongson and Herring (2019).

4 See Jones (2021), particularly p. 298–349 on FAFSWAG, a queer, vogue collective in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and how their performances can be placed in dialogue with trajectories of queer and trans performance from the US canon.

5 In February 2021, Kilia hosted Essence Ball at the Red Rattler in inner west Sydney with the promotional byline ‘Godmother’s Promise.’ As Tipa is not her surname, I refer to Kilia using her first name.

6 For more on the interconnections of HIV Prevention and ball cultures see Wong, Benjamin, and Arnold (2020).

7 Rae Rosenberg (2017, p. 144) also documents how community policing practices outside of the archetypal spaces of gay urbanity (such as bars and clubs) marginalize Black and Brown queer and trans youth in Boystown, Chicago. For an account of how this focus on gay male urbanity obscures practices of lesbian place- and world-making see Podmore (2001, 2006, 2016).

8 Acknowledgement of Country, particularly in some institutional contexts, stands in for active political recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and histories and ignores the material shifts required for it to be a successful political gesture. For instance, all levels of government in Australia perform an Acknowledgement of Country despite there being no federal constitutional recognition (at the time of writing) of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

9 For more on the nexus between Houses, non-white queer bodies, and questions of familial exclusion, see Bailey (2013, p. 80) and Manalansan (2003, p. 79).

10 For more on translation and Polynesian gender and sexual categories, see Besnier and Alexeyeff (2014).

11 See Wallace (1999) for further discussion of how Polynesian kinship categories transect gender-queer categories in ways that are easy to miss from the perspective of Western culture.

12 Transmisogyny refers to the discrimination and violence encountered by trans women and trans feminine people as the result of societal policing of gender boundaries as it meets the social denigration of femininity and femaleness (Serano 2007, p. 14–15). See also Krell (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Kelaita

Paul Kelaita is a research affiliate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. His research on queer art practices in Greater Western Sydney is focused on cultural imaginaries of queerness, ethnicity, and suburbia.