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 between ballroom historian and femme queen performance icon, Niambi “Prodigy” Stanley, and Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Trans Studies Postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Eva Pensis, 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. 

More information hereL https://publictrust.org/learn-your-history