The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
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. 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 commercial strategy for pop stars and clout chasers 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. 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.
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