Ballroom eroticism is neoliberal – makes queerness fungible and keeps political ontology intact

For erotic agency, then, to be effective as a practice of freedom, it cannot merely situate itself in the present and seek to indefinitely accommodate its sense of place in current regimes of biopolitics and sexual citizenship. As Lorde insists, one cannot destroy the master’s house with the master’s tools.26 Fracturing the present (or penises) through affirming one’s erotic agency “bottom(s) up” is clearly insufficient to create the necessary freedoms that would have a transformative effect on our lives. Valorizing the diverse sorts of erotic agency may be a necessary and indispensable act of affirmation for sustaining a life of the self-in-the-world against the odds, but it is still an insufficient condition for the effort of refashioning citizenship and unsettling the violence of erasures in the past and present; unless one can show that of itself, erotic agency is capable of engendering a politics that is aimed at bringing about something new, breaking with the old and obsolete structures of power and place. How does a recognition of erotic agency enable such a mo(ve)ment beyond a certain immersion in the present politics of citizenship in postcolonial states? Erotic agents may well be able to expand the notion of citizenship for themselves. But, if the ontologies of modern power remain reproduced by exclusion, one may ask, at what price Sheller’s “citizenship from below”? What is the sacrifice being contemplated and bargained for here? What type of communities may be gestated by it? [End Page 155]

The urge to refashion sexual citizenship notwithstanding, perhaps there is a more sinister or cynical context and story to be disclosed here—a tale that undoubtedly insinuates itself into the ways in which these erotic agents seek a “power of place” through dancehall cultural practices. And even if representing an erotic agency, these artistes may thus still be reproducing in their tactics for survival or freedom a sameness of market society’s fictions, fetishes, violence, and disavowal but at hitherto unforeseen scales. The gender-bending or queer activities champion an individual freedom—challenging a dehumanizing past and present but perhaps still deeply wedded to the promises that sustain neoliberal futures. What is undoubtedly consistent with the past is the continuous exercise of a struggle to overcome. Yet it appears as if futures remain shaped by the mantras of a neoliberal regime in a country where state presences and competitive and violent sovereignties coexist, reflecting and refracting an unholy politics that speeds up social and political processes of abject life. Might we be witnessing the first and deepest cut so far against “ancestral histories,” of silenced agencies that makes this idea of the inherent empowering potential of erotic agency a fading hope? This may be more sadly the case, if dancehall and its associated forms of embodied performances can be read also as the thinking and enacting of freedoms within the terms provided by neo-liberal regimes with their stress on self-responsibilization, distrust of (or weakened trust of) the more productive forms of national state governance,27 and a general drift to an alienating “cut throat market morality.”28