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

We are directed down a shopping arcade by a volunteer with SWARM emblazoned on their blue t-shirt. Our group, half the total audience of the night, crowds around the opening to a small alcove on the side of the arcade. Scrambling for space, we sit and stand on an assortment of stools and faux Persian carpets. The floor of the alcove is covered with blue and pink martial arts mats. Three pink sails suspended above mute the overhead light leaving the two spotlights in the corners of the space to illuminate the scene. The brick wall at the back of the space is bare except for an electricity box and a yellow and black sign that reads ‘WARNING CCTV 24hr video surveillance’. Three performers sit in line in the centre of the alcove facing to the side. Each is costumed from head to toe in an intricate satin, lace, and applique outfit. These costumes keep their gender ambiguous and their ethnicity is both veiled yet hinted at in the cut and hibiscus detail of their dress. The light blue bodices and skirts contrast with the deeper blue of the sleeves and elbow warmers. Each of the three also wears a dark-blue mask that covers their heads and obscures their faces except for eyes and lips. Echoing the hibiscus detail of the cloth, the front of each mask is adorned with bejewelled flower applique – clear and bright centre stones surrounded by yet more blue. Each outfit is completed with the addition of a retro microphone headset and speaker. Seated in formation, the three performers are poised and ready.

The performance piece Slay Your Oppressor(s) by artist Bhenji Ra was performed in this iteration by three queer of colour performers: Ra, Kilia Tipa – who performed under the name Koco Carey, and Davina Chor. Slay featured in Swarm: Collective Actions on Queen, a night of live art curated by performance company Branch Nebula and Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC) in Sydney’s outer south west in October 2016. A vogue-martial arts performance in a suburban shopping strip, Slay brings together two things often kept separate: queerness and suburbia. The suburbs are often invoked in queer thinking as the site of normativity, a place to escape from or return to once sufficiently coupled. This assumption tracks in the opposite direction to the inner city and a version of urban space that is imagined as the place where queers end up and the contours of antinormativity are drawn (Hodge 1995, Weston 1995, and Halberstam 2005). Cities and their queer spaces (enclaves, streets, shops, bars, clubs, and beats) also play a structuring role in queer lives lived elsewhere (Wotherspoon 1991, p. 70, Berlant and Warner 1998, p. 562, Herring 2010, Tongson 2011, and Kelaita 2021). The suburban south-western elsewhere that is at once backdrop, stage, and home to the performers in Slay allows me to excavate the narrative, aesthetic, and personal experience of queer urbanity as it plays out in Greater Western Sydney circa 2016. Commissioned with a specific focus on its local south-western Sydney context, Slay consisted of two performances in a shopping arcade. Since the performances went unrecorded, I pair my own experience as an audience member with photographs taken of the performers at the local train station (see Figures 1 and 2), plus some short video clips of the performers and piece included in an overview of Swarm. As is often the case with dance and performance, these photographs and video are the residual trace of the otherwise ephemeral event. Together, these elements convey multiply located understandings of visibility and violence that thrum underneath queer survival strategies in the suburbs.

Figure 1. Bhenji Ra, Slay Your Oppressor(s), 2016. Live performance with Koco Carey and Davina Chor, presented as part of Swarm: Collective Actions on Queen, a project of Campbelltown Arts Centre curated by Branch Nebula. Photography: Document Photography. Courtesy Bhenji Ra and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

The performance of Slay that I attended, which was the second of two on the night, was broken up into three distinct sections. Ra, Carey,¹ and Chor began by performing a martial arts kata, a set or sequence of choreographed movements and poses, which segued into a seated dialogue-driven piece and then morphed into a vogue session, a vernacular form of dance originating in the Black and Latinx ballroom scene in Harlem, New York.² The dialogic piece at the literal and conceptual centre of the work commenced with the three performers sitting down on the floor after the opening kata and drew to a close with the dancers standing up for the closing vogue. While Ra and Chor improvised verbal responses, the section between the opening kata and closing vogue was geared to Carey’s monologue which recounted her experience of a violent assault at a suburban house party. The experience of visibly feminine gay men and transgender people is the foundation of the performance and is given visceral expanse in Carey’s suburban story. As performed in Campbelltown in south-western Sydney, Slay suggests alternative ways of encountering queer visibility that confirms realities of violence against non-normative Brown bodies without presupposing an urban framework of exclusion reliant on suburban normativity. Slay’s twinning of risk and resistance in a narrative engaging ethnicity, violence, and family reveals that suburban queerness emerges within queer hierarchies of cultural capital and value drawn geographically.

Figure 2. Bhenji Ra, Slay Your Oppressor(s), 2016. Live performance with Koco Carey and Davina Chor, presented as part of Swarm: Collective Actions on Queen, a project of Campbelltown Arts Centre curated by Branch Nebula. Photography: Document Photography. Courtesy Bhenji Ra and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

Rather than confirm established critiques of dominant narratives of escape from non-urban places (Knopp 2004, Halberstam 2005, Gorman-Murray 2007 and 2009, Brown 2008 and 2012, Herring 2010, and Podmore 2016), I consider how different structures of exclusion including ethnic expectation, social regulation, and physical violence enact a more complex picture of inclusion in suburban worlds. On the face of it, Slay plays out a standard structure of metronormativity (Halberstam 2005, p. 34–36) in which suburban spaces are inhospitable to queer lives which begets policing, violence, exclusion and ultimately prompts relocation to more hospitable cities. This reading is as intuitive as it is inadequate in the appraisal of queer suburban lives and experiences. In the wake of the ossifications and reductions of the suburban narrative, I argue instead that violence, family, and negotiations of visibility typically understood as reasons for the ostensible dearth of queers in suburbs should be understood as part of the larger texture of queer inclusion in suburban worlds. As I will discuss, Slay Your Oppressor(s) demonstrates that anti-queer violence also indexes queer presence. While this might seem small consolation for those subjected to violence, I read Carey’s monologue as an agentic refiguring of standard accounts of resistance. Not only does her account further testify to queer presence in the face of violence, it is also shaped by an address to other suburban queers, particularly suburban queers of colour, and a sustaining account of family as a resource for survival.

My account of Slay Your Oppressor(s) and the queer cultural histories and formations it brings to the fore is framed through the racialization of Sydney’s suburban spaces. The default cleaving of queers and suburbs is tied to rote understandings of embodied experience that presume either an invisible whiteness or a hypervisible brownness in its mapping of suburban exclusion. I begin by discussing how the transnational conditions of vogue’s emergence in Australia tap into specifically Australian contexts of racialization centred around white tolerance. I then discuss the orientation of Slay Your Oppressor(s) toward the outer-suburban lives of queer people of colour via ethnicity and family, embodiment and gesture, and cultural imaginaries of place. Finally, I focus on Carey’s story to characterize how suburban queers of colour navigate violence, presence, resistance, and family, and illustrate how these come together in what I am calling suburban vogue. I pair contexts of racialization with different moments of gendered and sexualized in/tolerance (Salamon 2018, p. 3–4) to refine an approach to suburbia’s queer undercurrents. Suburban vogue renders the transnational movement of vogue in local formations of community, race, and suburban inclusion as opposed to solid formations of urban culture and suburban exclusion. The counter-history of inclusion in suburban spaces and the embodied and gestural techniques employed by queer and trans feminine people also realize vogue’s protean malleability true to the dance form’s roots.

Australian vogue

The US national conceit underlying accounts of queer visibility, community, culture, and safety has been roundly critiqued by Kath Browne and Leela Bakshi (2013, p. 8) who stress the need to consider cities and queer urbanities on their own terms (see also Gorman-Murray et al. 2008). The local spatial imaginaries invoked in Slay must be placed in the context of equally vibrant transnational imaginaries in order to scope out the racialized afterlife of Kath Weston’s (1995) ‘gay imaginary’.³ In Slay, transnational imaginaries are invoked most centrally in the use of vogue. Vogue conjures many things: honed Black and Brown queer and trans bodies, queer space, and communal resistance to hostile worlds. Vogue emerged in queer urban ball cultures and is rarely something associated with the suburbs. With its recent emergence in queer cultures in Australian and Asia-Pacific contexts,⁴ vogue is infused with different understandings of race that are tied to transnational cultural forms and local suburban spaces.

Ra is a key figure in the development of vogue and ballroom cultures in the Australian context. Ra is an Australian-born trans interdisciplinary artist and activist of Filipino descent who learned to vogue in New York before returning and establishing, as mother, the House of Slé (Ra 2018 and 2017). Kilia Tipa (Kiliati Pahulu) is a well-known member of Slé and godmother to Australian ballroom.⁵ Kilia is a trans non-binary Tongan and Maori Australian artist in her own right. The local vogue scene has its most publicly visible incarnation in Sissy Ball, an annual vogue ball originally curated by Ra first held at Carriageworks, an inner city arts and cultural precinct, as part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras cultural festival in 2018. Other Houses from across Sydney, Australia, and the Asia-Pacific region have hosted and competed in balls held in various inner-city Sydney community and arts venues. Importantly, The West Ball was hosted in January 2020 at The Street University, a development space for youth in Liverpool, a central hub in Sydney’s southwest. Hosted by House of Slé member and rapper Jamaica Moana and Xander Khoury, father of the House of Silky, The West Ball is the first ball held in Greater Western Sydney proper. In March 2021, The West Ball II was held at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, also in the Liverpool City Council area. The particular invocation of place, vogue, queer, and trans identity in The West Ball is an important site for further research.

Slay is an early expression of this nascent scene that connects the central tenets of community and family into a visible incarnation in performance art cultures at home in western Sydney. Vogue as dance form, and ballroom culture as the broader community scene, creates relays, if still evolving, between urban and suburban histories and spaces. This expands earlier studies into Australia’s queer suburban cultures which position more recognizable forms of urban community and politics (such as HIV prevention and health organizations such as ACON and institutions such as Mardi Gras) as one way to encounter queer spatial diversity in Sydney (Hodge 1995, McInnes, 2001).⁶ The social, cultural, and spatial parameters that keep queer and suburban separate fall short of accounting for the distribution of queerness throughout the expanded city while also missing completely the complex entanglement of inner-city New York and suburban Sydney that comes with the movement of queer cultural forms. Suburban vogue, as one iteration of suburban queerness (see Gorman-Murray and Nash 2019, Podmore and Bain 2020, Bain and Podmore 2020, 2021, and Kelaita 2021), reveals the tensions and contradictions that animate the theoretical standoff between suburban normativity and urban antinormativity and the histories and practices that make each manifest.

The relay between Sydney and New York is not exclusively one of antipodean queer aspiration on a global scale, or part of what Marlon M. Bailey (2013, p. 223; emphasis in original) critiques as the growing sense that ballroom culture is viewed as a ‘global phenomenon’ detached from its Black and Latinx roots, rather than a phenomenon ‘that has expanded globally’. The House relationships and other tendrils of social capital that helped birth the Sydney vogue scene are inseparable from the community and queer capital mobilized for its ongoing survival. Vogue in Sydney translates this urban cultural form from one of the emblematic international queer capitals within a local geographic, cultural, and racial logic.

In Slay and Australian contexts, the centrality of race in vogue is maintained and translated in local vernaculars. The localizing logic around cultural forms is not unique to vogue but is central to its travel and uptake, particularly as it ties to local understanding and language around race. Emerging from US contexts, ‘Person of colour’ (POC) operates as a transnational mode of identification and signal of political solidarity that can capture the three Slay performers – Ra, Carey, and Chor – with enough certainty despite the different positionality of Ra’s Filipino identity, Carey’s Tongan and Maori identity, and Chor whose identifications are not explicit in the performance or paratextual material. The naturalization of POC across borders (indicated here by my Australian spelling of colour) traversed by popular and academic culture does a lot of work to both homogenize and localize. Ra has opened all Sissy Balls with an acknowledgement, appropriately heavy with the weight of pedagogical immediacy, that ballroom begins with Black and Brown trans women. As well as recognising this racialized New York genesis, in the context of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, an institution that dominates the public image of Sydney’s queer urbanity, this acknowledgement works at multiple scales to identify the exclusions of queer and trans POC from gay-dominated spaces and histories (Caluya 2008, Ruez 2016, p. 288 and 2017, and Revanche 2018).⁷ It also signals that an integral part of the racialized imaginary suffusing ballroom’s transnational explosion is the centrality of transness. This acknowledgement is paired with the equally urgent acknowledgment of the unceded and continuing colonization of country. While an Acknowledgement of Country can at times seem rote,⁸ the activist roots infused in the space, and in Ra’s broader political activism, brings forth a more active postcolonizing logic (Moreton-Robinson 2003). As at Sissy Ball 2020, Aboriginal Elders also perform a Welcome to Country (which only an Indigenous person can do) and signal the coimplicated and coterminous political projects of decolonialism and trans and queer survival. Articulating Australian vogue relative to the histories of vogue’s emergence and local complexities of race, racism and colonialism, and racial identification offers one way of engaging with and ameliorating Bailey’s (2013, p. 222–224) concern that the international expansion of vogue and ballroom culture proceeds by scrubbing its Black and Latinx foundations.

Conjuring queer Campbelltown

Suburban vogue instantiates a transnational and cross-spatial imaginary that invests both in the Black and Latinx urban origins of vogue and in the differently Brown suburban contexts that foster it. Suburban vogue brings local geographies of race and class that divide Sydney into straight, ethnic, Brown western suburbs and the queer or queer friendly, rich, white inner city into dialogue with Black and Brown urban cultural and community formations. When Ra (2016) asserts that ‘a lot of my crew from my House are from that kind of [suburban] area’ she is tying the Black and Brown histories of vogue to the outer suburban context and the ethnic and spatial marginalization it invokes.⁹ Greater Western Sydney is comprised of north-west, west, and south-west areas each defined in different ways. Many social science and media protocols adhere to the state and federal divisions that carve it up into electorates. In this perspective, Greater Western Sydney is made up of 13 Local Government Areas (LGAs), but demographic or statistical modelling presents a clearer window on how it is culturally conceived (WESTIR 2017). These days Greater Western Sydney has over 2.3 million people (almost half of Sydney’s 2016 population of 4.8 million) and spans around 72% of the Sydney metropolitan region (WESTIR 2017, and Johnson et al. 1997, p. 6). Unsurprisingly, issues of growth, ethnic diversity, and suburban sprawl underpin the main cultural perceptions of this multicultural area, with social and national anxiety expressed around ethnic gang violence, refugee settlement, and the problems thought to be associated with youth and public housing (Poynting et al. 2004, and Collins and Poynting 2000). These anxieties are tightly wound with structural shifts in the Australian political and social landscape that yoke together suburban development and immigration policies – particularly the progressive relaxation of restrictions on non-white immigration from the 1970s (see Stratton and Ang 1994, Chambers 1997, Hage 1998, Noble et al. 1998, and Turner 2008). Racialization in the Australian context is an uneven process; this racialization is entwined with Australia’s ongoing colonial context, histories of racist immigration policies, more central framing of difference as ethnic difference, and self-imagining as egalitarian (Turner 2008, p. 575, and Stratton and Ang 1994, p. 154). Race functions here in a number of ways that shift with the decade. One more recent function is as a homogenizing overlay that creates white and non-white bodies and spaces by papering over the particularities of ethnic difference connected more closely to striations of multiculturalism or a census form.

The idea that Greater Western Sydney hosts a culturally and ethnically diverse population informs speaking and thinking about the western suburbs today. Ideas about spatial marginalization and working-class homogenization that accompanied earlier western Sydney models persist but mainly as supplements to the idea of the contemporary west as culturally other. The south-west, the geographical home of this article, is broad and captures places with diverse ethnic and class imaginaries including Campbelltown, 50km south-west of inner-city Sydney which is considered less racially and ethnically diverse in the cultural imaginary, and Liverpool, 27km south-west of inner-city Sydney which is considered hyper-diverse (Kelaita 2021). Each area is indexed to a variety of ethnicities but also gets captured and homogenized under racialized categories (e.g. white or its more often invoked corollary Australian, Asian, Middle Eastern, Aboriginal, African). The toponym ‘Campbelltown’ operates across geographic scales as a city, LGA (the scope of the city area administered by the local council), and suburb. The LGA of Campbelltown has a population of around 157,000, and covers the various points of interest including the shopping arcade and alcove in which Slay was performed and other suburbs mentioned in the work, Leumeah and Minto. This LGA has a largely Anglo population with over 60% born in Australia and over half citing their ancestry as Australian, English, Scottish or Irish (ABS 2016a). Campbelltown also, however, homes large Indigenous, Southern European, Middle Eastern, South East and East Asian communities and large communities from the Asia Pacific. Many areas throughout Campbelltown are lower and middle income with all three suburbs that orient Slay reporting lower than state and national median incomes (ABS 2016b, 2016c, 2016d). Campbelltown has a diverse population that congeals in different visions of the area as white, lower income (or working class), or as white with a substantial splash of brown, depending on internal or external vantage. In general, heightened profiles of class and race, and associated geographic stigma, underpin social and political framings of Greater Western Sydney, though these blanch with farther movement south or north. As part of the broader Live Art program of CAC, Slay was commissioned with a specific focus on its local south-western Sydney community, geography, and ‘socio-political concerns’ (Michael Dagostino in CAC 2016). Capturing these through the lens of queer visibility and violence manifests a particular version of queer inclusion in suburban worlds.

Swarm, the larger event of which Slay forms but a part, presents suburban space as configured around community. According to the exhibition text distributed to participants on its one and only night, Swarm ‘draws artists and audiences into the architectural fabric of Queen Street’ (CAC 2016), the central shopping strip in the Campbelltown central business district. The exhibition was staged in one of the archetypal spaces of Australian suburbia: a drab eighties shopping arcade, a commercial throughway designed to capture pedestrian shoppers. Broadly speaking, the Swarm curatorial rationale was based on bringing inner city-based artists out to engage the cultural capital represented by the western suburbs, namely community, ethnicity, and vernacular creative practices such as traditional Aboriginal ceremonies, primary school art and poetry projects, and scavenger hunts. These community-based practices engage the traditional owners of the land, school children from surrounding schools, the immediate Fijian community and immigrants settled in Campbelltown and adjacent suburbs. While bringing together contemporary artists with local communities is a fairly standard trope of cultural engagement under the Australian multicultural remit, Swarm added queers into this mix.

This inclusive version of broad community arts engagement is tested in Slay, a work that revolves around the issue of violence against queers. If Swarm invites queers into the suburban fold, Slay reveals that queer inclusion in the suburbs is premised on invisibility. In the first set of the performance of Slay, the dancers talk and dance without taking their masks off. In the second set, the three dancers proceed to take each other’s masks off after they sit down following the opening martial arts kata. Rather than revealing their queerness, this unmasking sets up the histories of violence that follow. During the process of unmasking, the dancers talk casually between themselves to convey their familiarity and intimacy as well as to segue to, and set the tone of, Carey’s story. Carey’s recounted story is the central scaffold of the performance weaving together threads of visibility, violence, resistance, family, and gesture into the broader geographic and cultural rug of suburban vogue. Carey immediately connects queerness with locality when she addresses the audience:

my sissies know the story, but … I wanted to share with you guys something that has happened to me, something that’s relevant to queers and how they react to violence, specifically in the suburbs out here in Campbelltown. Can you raise your hands if you’re from Campbelltown? … I see y’all!

This opening sets up the premise and content of the story, as well as its geographic parameters. Carey pointedly hails those from the area and continues to specify the coordinates of her life by asking ‘Does anyone know where Leumeah is?’ She then goes on to say that her aunty’s house is in Minto, ‘the very next suburb’. My own experience of these areas, having grown up between Campbelltown and Liverpool, underwrites my investment in this performance and Carey’s story. The suburban context is drawn in increasing detail through the specification of local streets, schools, and train stations, so that we are in no doubt as to where we are.

Slay evolved out of a residency that was originally focused on ‘sissy boys’ and ‘femme queens’ (Taylor 2015), figures that relate to each other in complicated ways. As the target of peer-generated homophobic and transphobic violence, often within the family or the school, the sissy boy is a key figure in the maintenance of suburban normativity (Dines 2010, p. 54–65). ‘Sissy’ becomes a multivalent term to signal the figure of the sissy boy as well as the broader coalitional vernacular Carey employs to describe her ‘sissies’ (see also Russell 2018). In the Swarm exhibition pamphlet that accompanied the performance, the consideration of the ‘safety and visibility of the queer body’ is extended to include the broader geographical remit of ‘the suburban and rural landscape’ (CAC 2016). This rhetorical conjunction of suburban and ‘rural’ areas homogenizes space beyond the inner city, a logic familiar in established critical accounts of the queer city (Weston 1995, and Phillips et al. 2000). Consistent with the conflation of urbanity and queer visibility central to metronormativity, the Swarm text extends the presumption of violence against the queer body across all non-urban space. However, the suburban queer of colour particularity invoked in Slay challenges the homogenizing logics of inclusion and exclusion that map onto the conjunction of urban/visible and coming out/moving out (Manalansan 2009, p. 40, Herring 2010, and Ruez 2016, p. 288).

In her story, Carey self-identifies as gay and describes herself as having been a femme child, both a sissy and a femme queen. Months later, my understanding of the performance was framed through a different lens when I came across Carey’s bio in the context of a queer performance art residency that describes her as a trans non-binary fakaleitī artist (Performance Space 2017). Fakaleitī is the Tongan term for those assigned male at birth who subsequently adopt characteristics typically associated with femininity. The resonance of the term fakaleitī sets important parameters for local translations of queer and trans identity. Writing from the perspective of Pacific sexual ethnography, Lee Wallace (2003, p. 141) argues that although fakaleitī is often equated with transgender, ‘to bluntly translate fa’afafine [in Samoan], māhū [Tahitian and Hawaiian], or fakaleitī as transgenderism sacrifices the syntactic elasticity of the multivocal Polynesian terms and removes the context-specific valences of their usage’.¹⁰ This suggests the importance of regarding Carey’s narrative as located in a complex time and space that engages different and constantly altering ideas about gender transition as an embodied and socialized experience. Certainly, Slay locates gender within a highly specific set of cultural coordinates that reveal interpenetrated investments of race, ethnicity, class, location, and age, all of which are negotiated in the time and space of the performance itself and in its ephemeral afterlives. This has important ramifications for thinking about queer inclusion in suburban worlds, particularly when challenging the social and spatial reductions that delimit what we recognize and understand as suburban queerness. As Amelia Jones (2012, p. 218) argues, ‘we are not “post-” identity or beyond considerations of how visual and other identifications condition how we make sense of the world’. In spatialized terms, perceptions of fluidity and stability condition ways of looking at both queerness and suburbia. Queer identifications then not only complicate our commonsense assumptions about suburban worlds but are also complicated by them.

Not quite the look

After orienting us to the area, Carey shifts the focus to her teenage self: ‘It happened, I was maybe 15 or 16, like I knew I was gay … Campbelltown isn’t quite the look for someone who’s gay’. In this complex statement of self-avowal and geographic incompatibility, Campbelltown is cast as inhospitable to the queer youth who both stands out against the backdrop it provides and is simultaneously set apart from gay culture by association with the suburb. As the performance continues, Carey is positioned at the intersection of two threatening forces: the threat of violence that proceeds both from the suburb and the threat of rejection that proceeds from its presumed counterpoint, urban white gay culture. Caught between these threats, suburban queerness emerges as a question of cultural capital and value, rather than a question of categorization. The queers that Slay speaks for are feminine men and trans women from the suburbs who may or may not identify with gay urban norms against which they may be found to be lacking.

Slay uses a hybridized vogue-martial arts embodied practice to draw attention to the suburban street as a space of both danger and joyous resistance. The opening martial arts kata sees all three performers move slowly and in unison. Rather than overstate the centrality of martial arts to the work, which is admittedly secondary to the central movement and community formations invoked by vogue, martial arts here connects the defensive character of existing as a suburban queer to the defensive House formations that anchor ball culture. Being seen as queer in the suburbs is over-determined by histories that take the city as the site of queerness and the suburbs as the site of straightness. In the suburbs, queer identity is thus revealed to be based on structures of understanding that rely on and stabilize certain antinormative markers that are themselves invested in stable ideas about space and identity. At the same time, however, Slay challenges the rigid imaginary that casts suburbia as devoid of queers and queerness. These performative relays between lived and imagined conceptions of space reveal the ways in which Campbelltown can be both inhospitable to someone who is queer, while simultaneously being the place that queer person lives or has grown up in.

The persistence of queers in the suburbs opens up space to consider the role of antinormativity in queer theory, since suburbs are considered bastions of the normative. The conflicting imperatives of queerness and suburbanity speak to different lived and imaginary investments in fluidity and stability respectively. The sexual, race, ethnic, class, and gender entanglements that animate different suburban milieus speak to the multivalent histories and sociabilities that have often been flattened and paved over in mobilizations of the suburbs as homogenous, insular, and isolated (Tongson 2011, p. 10–17). Karen Tongson’s (2011, p. 10) rethinking of an ostensible suburban normative illustrates how the coercive force of urbanity inheres in generalized views of ‘the suburbs’. Building on Tongson’s approach to US suburbs as raced, classed, and sexualized, I position Slay as recasting the suburban normative through the lens of dominant modes of Australian multicultural ethnicity in a way that shows up the queer antinormative assumption and the symbolic categorization of difference it enacts. Rather than simply identifying queer culture and suburban culture as antinormative and normative respectively, Slay reveals these two concepts to be mutually constitutive of each other.

In narrating queer identification from the positionality of the suburbs, Slay draws out the potential of the suburbs to be queer. This ruptures any sure framework of queer legibility. If the suburbs are regarded as the space of heteronormativity then it is therefore logical to conclude that they do not support queer thriving (see Muñoz 2009, p. 72 and Tongson 2011, p. 15). There is no expectation that suburban space will reveal queer habitation or visibility. The queer address from the suburbs to audiences – including those of us who grew up queer in these spaces – challenges us to reconsider the mapping of normative experience as well as non-normative expectation on to space.

Potential and expectation get drawn together around embodied strategies of movement within homes, shopping centres, and train stations and the disciplinary strategies that police these movements. Taking cue from José Muñoz (2009), gesture, embodied and spoken, is one way to apprehend these strategies and the gendered, sexualized, and racialized difference and expectation they index, such as in the line connecting the sissy boy as suburban figure to the sissy as a Brown world-making figure embodied in Carey’s narration and, emblematically, in Sissy Ball. For Muñoz (2009, p. 68), gestures generate affective reverberations through their connection to broader social expectations. Such gestures also serve a demonstrative function to ‘transmit ephemeral knowledge of lost queer histories and possibilities within a phobic majoritarian public culture’ (Muñoz 2009, p. 67). Using this framework, Carey’s embodied recollection of her past figures not just a personal history but also the more general possibility of suburban queerness. As Carey’s narration unfolds across the performance it tells a complex double story in which the history of queer suburban exclusion and shame also enacts a counter-history of queer inclusion in suburban space. The queer gesture of effeminacy is placed in an unexpected spatial context. The established and largely unquestioned understanding of Greater Western Sydney reveals gendered and raced expectations of space that discipline bodies in their own turn. As Mary Russo (quoted in Mason 2002, p. 90) argues ‘certain bodies, in certain public framings, in certain public spaces, are always already transgressive – dangerous and in danger’. Although heteronormative conceptions of gender, sexuality, and race determine that the queer body is out of place in the Brown spaces of western Sydney, this is an assumption that can be undone through racialized and gendered gesture.

Queer and suburban belongings are marked in Slay under an inclusive and reparatory brownness. Muñoz (2006, p. 679, 2013) argues that brownness is a ‘collective mapping of self and other’ in relation to ‘other modes of difference’. Although the transnational brownness Muñoz (2013) invokes is contextually specific to modes of US citizenship, his ‘rich urban ecology of the brown city’ illuminates ways of thinking the racialized interconnections between ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in other geopolitical spaces. Although the term Brown has limited vernacular traction in Australia as either a group or an individual identifier, its potential for non-white group identification corresponds to the resignification of queer and suburban identity that Slay works toward. Slay engages what Muñoz (2000, p. 76) calls ‘a brown world of feeling, organized by the affective belongings between people of color’. This brown world of belonging is distinct from the gay collectivities associated with urban city space and its racialized striations. Brownness captures the way the cultural background of Ra and her ‘sister-collaborators’ (Binghao 2016) unfolds in the suburban arcade. The costumes, described in the opening of this article and designed by Willow Darling, are sartorial metaphor for this brownness, informed by the multiplicity of different forms of movement (vogue and martial arts), ethnicities (including Filipino, Maori and Tongan), and interconnections between gender conformity and the requirement to present or mask ethnic difference as in Carey’s story, to which I’ll now turn.

Dangerous visibilities

Slay mobilizes stories and histories of violence to challenge the naturalized supposition that queerness is not at home in a suburban context that is always-already coded as straight and ethnic. As the three unmasked dancers sit on the mats, Carey narrates a story that sounds out intertwined concerns around ethnicity, space, and gender. She tells us about a suburban house party at one of her sister’s friend’s houses. As Carey tells us, the party raises red flags from the get go. ‘Brown kids’ she recognizes from Campbelltown train station as ‘troublemakers’ are there but no parents. Despite misgivings, she decides to stay: ‘like let me just do the dance floor, let me just live my life’.

Carey’s narrative is complicated by contradictory impulses toward staying and going, inclusion and exclusion, which can only be resolved through violence or dance. Carey’s dancing initially shifts her mood. She tells us, ‘I was feeling a little bit better, I was feeling amazing’. Then the party atmosphere chills when a bully known from school walks in. Breaking out of the narration for a moment, Carey gives an aside to the audience:

He was in my grade, but he was much bigger than me. He was a Tongan boy. I’m tiny, he’s massive, you know what I mean? In class he asked me ‘are you Tongan?’ I was like, ‘I’m Tongan … proudly.’ But then he said, ‘Oh, but you’re a faggot. You can’t be Tongan because you’re gay.’ I was like, ‘Ohhhh kay’ and I said something to make him really pissed off cause I wasn’t just gonna sit there. So I knew when I saw him at the party, oh this is gonna be trouble.

The interplay of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in this recounted scene is fraught since it is based on rigid heteronormative boundaries that are both gendered and explicitly ethnicized. ‘You’re a faggot’ brings Carey back to her sexual particularity as a ‘sissy’ which separates her from the Tongan identity that the bully feels it is his right to police. The bully’s chilling presence ruptures the possibility of the dance floor and renders the suburbs a place where Carey is surveilled and vulnerable.

Ironically, these heteronormative impulses are also represented in the circumstances that allow Carey and her sisters to go to the party to begin with. Carey’s sisters are only allowed to go if Carey goes with them as their protector. Carey’s mum tells her ‘you’ll be there protecting them, you have to go’. Familial and ethnic expectations explain Carey’s being at the party in the first place, which also leads to her being hit and then chased through the surrounding suburban streets.

The story Carey tells pivots on the tension between kinship categories and queer categories. For the bully, Carey can’t be Tongan because she’s gay but for Carey’s mother, teenage Carey’s gender transitivity does not remove her from the obligation to police and protect the sexuality of her sisters.¹¹ Carey’s sense of alarm when the bully from school walks in – ‘oh this is gonna be trouble’ – is warranted. Carey resumes her tale about the party to tell us that everyone is drawn outside by a commotion. Turning away in disgust, Carey is hit in the back of the head. Initially thinking it may have been an accident, Carey quickly shifts from denial to ‘survival mode’. Once she has checked that her sisters are okay, her attention and everyone else turn to her. ‘Who the FUCK hit me?!’ she says, before continuing:

Ok, so I was like, this isn’t the look. I need to survive. I need to survive. I need to survive. Ok, I was like, exits. Ok, exits. Exits. You know when, like, when something happens at the station, and like you know, like, someone calls you a faggot and you’re like, yes, I can attack but also where’s my exits. Where can I escape. Like, honestly, sometimes it’s just about surviving.

Carey’s monologue demonstrates the way that figurative understandings of space run up hard against actual spatial awareness, which includes things like exit strategies from unsafe situations. These understandings are given particular resonance in relation to the homophobic violence encountered in the familiar surroundings of the suburb in which one has grown up queer. Gail Mason (2002, p. 84–85) captures the way these ‘seeming small incidents’ redraw the boundaries of ‘the generic hazards of heteronormativity’ and connote more severe forms of violence. In line with this observation, Carey uses the experience of being called a faggot at the train station to metonymically signal the broader body maps that are vital to queer people negotiating the continuum of violence in familiar as well as unfamiliar space. Body maps, for Mason (2002, p. 88), are ‘the specific product of the integration of the trope of visibility into the broader safety maps that lesbians and gay men construct’. Visibility, in this sense, covers the selective disclosure of one’s queerness in different locales (Mason 2002, p. 87). While the role of homophobic slurs in policing gender extends beyond sexuality (Tomsen 2003, Pascoe 2005), the boundaries around visibility and safety as well as the danger of more severe forms of violence are intensified for trans women navigating transphobia and transmisogyny.¹² Safety maps and selective disclosure are especially acute for trans women of colour who experience alarmingly high rates of violence (see Butler 1993, p. 130, Doan 2007, p. 60–61, Snorton and Haritaworn 2013, p. 67–68, Salamon 2018, p. 20). Slay approaches space from this vantage point. As a ‘sissy’, Carey is particularly vulnerable to the policing of heteronormative gender in ways similar and dissimilar to her Tongan sisters. Slay redirects attention away from the fantasy of safe space to the reality of a space that requires certain disavowals and investments in order to keep certain bodies safe.

Slay makes explicit the effects of not wanting or not being able to pass as straight or cis in suburban space. The inhospitability of the suburbs to queers has two linked effects: violence against the visibly queer body and the resulting movement of queers out of the suburbs into the city. But what also needs acknowledging is the stickiness of suburban identity for those queers who leave but take their suburbanness, sometimes indexed to their ethnicity, with them.

The intertwined effects of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity unfold in multiple directions as Carey’s story continues from the recounting of the initial hit, the subsequent taking stock of exits, and the chase that results. After being thrown inside for her own protection, Carey attempts to leave the party. Carey tells us she attempted to leave unnoticed then heard someone call out, ‘“Stop that faggot we need to get him” and that’s when everything clicked and [she] was just like, ok survival’. While running to escape Carey slips and falls on the rain-slicked pavement. She remembers laying on the pavement and being kicked, ‘but they weren’t connecting … It wasn’t until later I realized they were actually getting my sister who was just over me’. In a bleak turn of events and expectations, Carey’s sister ends up having to protect her. Carey credits her sisters with both opening the gate out of the front yard and getting her away. Carey also says that it was the imperious ‘RUN!’ from one of her sisters that galvanized her resolve to escape and survive.

The issue of visibility is made explicit in Carey’s story of violence when she recalls being chased and running through the suburban streets where ‘everything was … the enemy … The lights were the enemy … every car that drove past’. The resounding toll of this moment is clear when Carey recounts finding a place to hide and fearing for her life. Carey’s fear for her life recasts the familiar spaces of suburbia as hostile territory. Visibility here becomes explicitly about being caught in the headlights and becoming a target. If being queer means being visible how can Carey stay in the suburb she calls home? The various positive and negative connotations of visibility are traceable across Carey’s story from her opening ‘I see y’all’ to the dangerous visibility exemplified by being caught in beams of light. However, the connotations of light shift in the photographic documentation of the work. Taken at twilight, these photographs capture the three performers at the local train station. All three are fully masked (see Figure 3). This occupation of a site previously associated with bullying provides a counterpoint to Carey’s inset story. The varying lightscapes engaged by Slay suggest both risk and resistance.

Figure 3 . Bhenji Ra, Slay Your Oppressor(s), 2016. Live performance with Koco Carey and Davina Chor, presented as part of Swarm: Collective Actions on Queen, a project of Campbelltown Arts Centre curated by Branch Nebula. Photography: Document Photography. Courtesy Bhenji Ra and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

The brief sequence showing the performers at the train station included in the video overview of the broader Swarm event compellingly locates queerness within suburban space in a way not reducible to moments of violence. Following establishing shots of Campbelltown train station, the three costumed figures can be seen walking down the stairs before positioning themselves at the entrance to an underground pedestrian tunnel. They stand posing against the railings in their ornate blue outfits, fully masked, defiantly greeting those exiting the suburban station. What would in other contexts be understood as loitering – a practice often associated with youth of colour (Manalansan 2005, p. 146) – is here recast as a mode of standing ground non-aggressively, as in a martial-arts pose of ready defensiveness.

This confident claiming of the public space of the station suggests that queerness belongs here, with or without the sanction of art or performance. It is not incidental that in the video overview of Swarm, the train station vignette is set to a radio edit of queer of colour favourite Princess Nokia’s (Destiny Frasqueri) ‘Tomboy’ (2016). Catchy beats and popularity of Princess Nokia aside, the tomboy, like the sissy boy, figures as a symbol of gender non-normativity and youth (Halberstam 2004, p. 193–194). The gender transitivity of the tomboy, the sissy boy, as well as the femme queen, queer adult, trans person, and fakaleitī, among many others, suggest that risk and resistance traffic in markers of normativity while simultaneously displacing them. This displacement also shifts our sense of suburban spaces uncontroversially seen as the site of normativity, often code for rigid suppression and exclusion.

Instrumentalizing vogue

The double-edged potential of visibility as risk and resistance is embodied by the queer suburban person of colour, who is simultaneously too gay for the suburbs and too Brown for the city. Slay revolves around a heady mix of suburban narratives of belonging that reflect the pressure to pass as either ethnic or queer (see also Muñoz 2020, p. 128–140). As Muñoz (2000, p. 70; emphasis in original) argues, ‘minoritarian identity has much to do with certain subjects’ inability to act properly within majoritarian scripts and scenarios’. In this sense, it is not that these narratives are incompatible, but that being ethnically queer unsettles standard accounts of identity that assume their separation. Speaking to both positive and negative visibilities, as well as more nuanced narratives of ethnicity, Carey’s Tongan identity generates moments of exclusion and inclusion throughout the story. Carey’s attacker is a bully driven at least partly by his own investment in a homophobic version of Tonganness. Carey’s Tongan family, however, is also part of the story. Carey’s sisters, mother, niece, nephew, and aunt made up the front-row audience on the night of the performance. Their warm presence together with Carey’s performed story challenges the perception that ethnic enclaves are exclusively homophobic as well as the perception that queerness is tied only to the city.

The narrated story ends with Carey hiding under a car wondering ‘is this how I die?’ With the inset story finished, we are delivered back to silence sitting on our stools on the faux Persian carpets in the shopping arcade. The gravity of the experience weighs on both the performers sitting in the alcove and the audience watching from our carpeted vantage point. The still tension at the end of the narration is broken when two small children, Carey’s niece and nephew, cross the invisible boundary between arcade and alcove, audience and performers, as their mum urges them to hug and console Carey. They don’t actually hug her, but the familial gesture nevertheless breaks the strain of the moment and makes performers and audience laugh. Exemplifying the porousness of the performance as a whole, the kids ignore the strictures of the performance space that keep the rest of us rooted in place. They return to their mum and a warmer more comfortable silence follows that is different from the earlier silence. Whether impromptu or scripted, the familial embrace becomes part of the suburban queer performance.

The story may be over at this point, but the performance is not. The space opened up by the children’s intervention eases the shift into the closing voguing sequence. The inclusive extended family that breaks the fourth wall parallels the familial world of vogue with its Houses and kinship subcultures that support and structure the various manifestations of dance, drag, vogue, and ball culture (Bailey 2013, p. 79–82). In this moment dance, not violence, binds queer bodies with the ethnic suburban cultures that raised them.

Dance in Slay is used to highlight the relationship between gender, sexuality, and ethnicity by making a space for the queer body in the suburban family. This is specifically a space for Carey who tried to find her corner on the suburban dance floor and re-finds it in vogue recast as a form of self-defence. After the kids return to their seats, there is a pause before Ra and Chor start chanting, ‘Bitch better/Bitch had better’. As Ra and Chor continue, Carey joins in with, ‘Who the fuck hit me’. The three performers join voices in order to chant, ‘I AM NOT THE ONE. I AM NOT OK. WE ARE NOT OK’. They then stand up and take turns voguing in the centre of the alcove while continuing to chant. The opening kata, a slow flow of movements, and the narration, seated and still, make way for the quicker pace of duckwalks and dips. The vocals, now a soundtrack to vogue, sample key moments in the story as if to insist that embodied performance can be a survival strategy. ‘Who the fuck hit me. I am not ok. Is this how I die?’ These chants animate the movement of the performers in a dance style that blends elements of ball culture as Brown world-making and voguing, with its echoes of martial arts called forth in Slay, as a hybrid form of self-defence. The proximity of dance and violence speaks directly to vogue and other queer survival strategies exercised in phobic majoritarian culture. While we associate these strategies with the clubs of Harlem they can also be found in a western Sydney suburban shopping strip.

By centralizing Black, Indigenous, and Brown bodies and histories in the present of Sydney vogue, Bhenji Ra, Kilia Tipa, the House of Slé, and other Sydney voguers, connect to older and popular histories of the New York scenes. Sydney’s racial profile manifests geographically. Western Sydney is an amplified locus for the geographic marking of ethnic and racial difference: early waves of white ethnic immigration, subsequent Middle Eastern and Asian immigration, and more recent African immigration and intensification of Middle Eastern migration – both forced and voluntary – have all played a part in carving up an imagined space of ethnic difference drawn along lines of race, class, and value. Inasmuch as ball cultures and the various community formations such as Houses and cultural forms such as vogue remain entwined with an ethos of queer acceptance and a politics of racialized, trans and gender diverse visibility, I have argued that these cultures are tethered to geographies that exceed the inner city. In underscoring this connection via the suburbs around Campbelltown, Slay initially makes two things clear. The first, that these queer, Brown, and otherwise urban-invoked communities not only draw from outer suburbs but exist within and energize those same spaces. At its foundation, this symbiosis offers a model of suburban inclusion that is different to the model of exclusion and escape overdetermining Sydney’s suburbs and the inner city that exists, in both real and imagined ways, as its counterpoint. The second, that violence against non-normative queer and trans bodies persists despite this enriching relationship. Offering a different view of suburban inclusion around Brown world-making and more complex lines of familial acceptance and ethnic contestation does not subvert the real issues that queer and trans people of colour negotiate. Living in and moving through outer suburban spaces marked by white, white ethnic, and non-white formations of family, gender, and sexuality places suburban inclusion within a broader context of social imaginaries around national, local, and ethnic identity that can often be uncomfortable and awkward or, as we have seen, dangerous and violent. Slay Your Oppressor(s) and the performers themselves, however, refuse to cede suburban space to the structures and perpetrators of violence that erase and expel. We see this refusal in the title of the performance itself, the occupation of the suburban train station, the hybrid vogue-martial arts practice, and the refashioning of Carey’s experience of survival as a marker of queer presence and a point of shared resistance. As I have argued, the performance ruptures the reductions of queer urbanity that sees queers only at home or together in the city and racism that sees ethnic communities and families as an unequivocal locus of homophobia.

Suburban vogue captures the productive energies of spatially inflected racialization by tying the emergence of vogue in Australia to western Sydney; vogue needs the western and south-western suburbs for its shape and voice. Community and individual survival are underscored in this iteration by foregrounding the negotiations of visibility that characterize suburban queerness. Suburban vogue is then not only a way of accounting for the translation of race and trans politics embedded in vogue and ballroom cultures but also an important way of recognizing that this translation can only operate with consideration of the relationships between urban and suburban space.

The importance of suburban vogue exceeds the hybrid vogue-martial arts performance itself. As a survival strategy, suburban vogue also captures the ways that queer, trans, and gender diverse people navigate safety and survival in their everyday lives in spaces still understood within heteronormative logics of expectation. Erasure, denial, and violence characterize this expectation, and, as a result, condition what is seen or not seen as an instance of queer suburban life, existence, or experience. As my account has made clear, the laboured exclusion and policing of queers winds queerness into the fabric of the suburbs, whether or not we stay. Suburban vogue is one example of suburban queerness that comes into relief when we identify and expand our logics of expectation. As I have argued, suburban vogue is shaped by realities of queer risk and anti-queer violence, a defiance of the proprietorial presumptions inherent in policing and violence, a mobilization of family (in its many forms) as a resource, and a direct and constitutive address to suburban queers generally and suburban queers of colour specifically. Slay Your Oppressor(s) ends with the three unmasked performers leading the audience in a procession out of the arcade and back up Queen Street where cars and people pass by. Music continues to play and the three performers dance while leading the audience down familiar streets made newly unfamiliar. The final walk through Campbelltown is a collective avowal of both queer existence in the suburbs and the tenuousness of suburban normativity.

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.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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.

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).