Neg - Go To Werk - Michigan 7 2023 KLAB

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Ballroom Bad
Ballroom culture is bad – it reconceptualizes a neoliberal orientation towards politics and engagement
Heller 18 (Meredith, Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies @ Northern Arizona University, PhD in Theater Studies and Feminist Studies @ UC – Santa Barbara, Social Semiotics, “RuPaul realness: the neoliberal resignification of ballroom discourse”)
In the ballroom scene, “realness” is a form of theatrics wherein performers mimic the look and demeanor of, for example, a business executive or Ivy League student. Ballroom is a performance arena developed by queer people of Color in response to pervasive racism in the 1960s and 1970s drag queen pageants in the US (Street 2016). Documentary texts Paris is Burning (1990) and My House (2018) illustrate how ballroom members linguistically use realness as an identifier for when a queer person is performatively presenting “as much as possible like your straight counterpart” and “display[ing] how I blend in with other heterosexual people.” Thus, realness names a specific theatrical gender-bending methodology performers deploy at a ball to unmark their bodies as sexually queer and/or “gender nonconforming or as transgender” and visually present themselves within a racially and socioeconomically specific form of heteronormativity they do not personally embody (Bailey 2013, 59; 55). While realness is primarily used to name this specific form of ballroom performance, it also operates as a larger in-community discourse about how marginalization is effected via what Wiegman calls “economies of visibility,” or the rendering of stratification through visual observation of difference (1995, 4). In this regard, realness is an ideological outline for how marginalized people can performatively manipulate public perceptions that mark them as different. But outside the ballroom scene, mainstream entertainment and social media deploy realness with a starkly different connotation. For example, on the drag queen contest show RuPaul’s Drag Race, realness is linguistically used to denote an unusually creative or unique gender-bending look (e.g. “leprechaun realness” or “X-men weird angel devil realness”) (March 23, 2015; April 14, 2017). In fact, in an argument between Drag Race judges over the elimination of contestant Courtney Act, RuPaul identifies Act’s realistic looking heterosexual and cisgender drag character as “doing this realness thing” and Michelle Visage retorts “I don’t want real; I want a drag queen” (April 7, 2014). This article investigates the semiotic phenomenon of “realness,” specifically the difference between how ballroom members use the term and how it is engaged across popular English-language media texts. Over the last decade, realness has entered mainstream vernacular via television, entertainment news and literature, and social media. In these forums, realness takes on very different connotations than it does in the ballroom. Rookie Magazine (2012) says realness means “staying true to your roots and refusing to soften or change yourself for the dominant culture” and Redefining Realness author Janet Mock deploys it as a synonym for being “authentic, meaning who I actually am” and “proclaiming who you [are] to others” (2014, 249; 77). In these contexts, realness is not telegraphing the benefits of mimicking heteronormative identity but rather conveying the neoliberal ideology that publicly embracing one’s identity differences is economically and culturally beneficial. Certainly the meaning and application of linguistic signs shift and, in fact, some feminist theorists see term resignification projects as a critical means of altering power interests (Butler 1993; Enke 2012). But, as I will demonstrate, realness’ significant semiotic shift is neither affirmative nor neutral. Feminist resignification projects work to transform signs that are currently serving the hegemony into vehicles that enable oppressed groups to articulate power structures and form coalitions. Conversely, what I am calling “RuPaul realness” limits how marginalized populations can articulate their own modes of success, thus transforming their own cultural product into a tool that reifies the hegemonic structures that oppress them. I propose that a major reason for the multimodality of RuPaul realness stems from frequent usage on RuPaul’s Drag Race – Logo TV’s most successful show and now VH1 ratings powerhouse – and its extension to social media by the show’s producers and active fan base (Wortham 2018). Hasinoff (2008) and Thompson (2010) argue that US-based “televised talent/job search” contest shows model neoliberalism by framing successful contestants as those that understand how valuable their embodied differences are (Ouellette and Hay 2008, 127). Neoliberal identity politics contextualizes certain capacities of self as valuable “cards” in a commercial market. Thus, contestants’ successes serve as evidence that they were “self-enterprising” and did what was necessary to advance, including fashioning parts of themselves into marketable commodities (Ouellette and Hay 2008, 127). Brown refers to this as “human capital,” or the “economization” of subjects as their own “entrepreneurial and investment capital” (2015, 35, 33, 36). Many aspects of individual embodiment such as skin color were conceptually formulated as key human differences for the purpose of maintaining power and stratification. However, neoliberal identity politics frames oppressed differences as unique and authentic aspects of the self, and posits them as having a special capital advantage in a free market. Contestants often model neoliberal identity politics by making pride-based statements about their non-white racial or other marginalized identity designations (Hasinoff 2008, 335). I add to the literature on neoliberalism and contest television by demonstrating how this politics is communicated through the deployment of particular loaded buzzwords. On Drag Race, it happens when judges or contestants use realness as an adjective for an unusually fierce drag look or winning performance. The high frequency of realness usage on Drag Race may be due to the show’s “structured reality” format where producers shape narrative and flow (Hill 2014, 116). However, I argue that any realness statements are coproduced with contestants who desire to present themselves as likable or memorable characters. For the majority of queens that will not win Drag Race, building this notoriety directly feeds into their future career opportunities and successes. In this regard, realness is not merely a descriptor for fabulous drag but also a coded message about the commercial power of putting one’s fabulously queer self to work. In this article, I trace the semiotic shift of realness by first outlining how the term is deployed in the ballroom scene to delineate an innovative drag practice, convey cultural commentary, and articulate a minoritarian strategy of survival. I then explore how contest shows like Drag Race reflect neoliberal identity politics when they commodify minority cultural products for mass commercial consumption. To document the neoliberal context and deployment of RuPaul realness, I conduct a content and textual analysis of season 4 (the noted launch point for Drag Race’s popularity) through its most recently completed season 10 (Framke 2017). I then compare this to how realness is used in various mass media texts, including in user-generated English-language Twitter posts where keywords and hashtags are critical shorthand communication devices. My study reveals that the widespread circulation of this resignified term maintains hegemonic power practices: realness has become a polemical discourse that delegitimizes the lived realities and success methods of the very individuals that created the term.
Ballroom eroticism is neoliberal – makes queerness fungible and keeps political ontology intact
Crichlow 15 (Michaeline A. Crichlow is a historical sociologist in the Departments of African and African American Studies and Sociology at Duke University (“Categories, Citizenship, Erotic Agency, and the Problem of Freedom,” Small Axe, Volume 19, Number 1, March 2015 (No. 46))
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
Their attempt to refashion this space into the ball-room reveals the extent to which that space fails at activating resistive agency.
Harper ‘94 ( Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature; Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, English; Director, Gender and Sexuality Studies at NYU (Phillip Brian, "The Subversive Edge": Paris Is Burning, Social Critique, and the Limits of Subjective Agency, Diacritics, Vol. 24, No. 2/3, Critical Crossings (Summer - Autumn, 1994), pp. 90-103)
It is easy enough to identify the constituent factors in the reputed subversiveness of ball culture. Jim Farber's own formulation makes it quite clear that it is the demonstration of the "mutability of identity"-effected in particular through ball contestants' achievement of Realness-that provides the requisite "edge" to the culture's sociopolitical significance. According to John Howell, that demonstration inevitably raises the questions:" [W]hat is authentic in social roles? Who does our culture reward and who does it exclude, and how different are they? What is male, what is female? Can our chromosomal hard-wiring be reprogrammed?"[11]. Howell's identification of these as "bottom-line questions" implies that the mere posing of them is a radical political act; and since, according to Howell, it is "voguing" itself that thus "leads us to deep issues," ball practice emerges, in his rendering, as the clear agent of subversive critique. But, of course, however critically efficacious it may be, Realness styling itself appears as the effect of a motivated regimen undertaken by specific identifiable agents, namely, the "voguers" who, in Farber's terms, achieve "personality overhauls" by actively" construct[ing] their identities." These formulations manifest a curious conflation. By way of indicating the intentionality of their efforts to make themselves over as recognizable types-to "overhaul" their attitudes and appearances, as they indisputably do-Farber concomitantly suggests that the ball contestants enact an equally voluntaristic transformation in their very selves, figured here as their" personalities" and "identities." The positing of such an accomplishment is potentially appealing for at least two closely related reasons: (1) it imputes to denizens of the ball milieu an expanded agency whereby they seem able to alter apparently fundamental elements of social experience; and (2) it thus recuperates those same personages as active producers not only of political critique but of significant social-structural change. Thus the attractiveness of this scenario is easy to understand. After all, a (if not the) primary challenge of contemporary culture is the achievement of some degree of resistant political agency that isn't immediately undercut by any of the various infrastructural mechanisms through which it is registered and disseminated; and for such agency to be achieved by persons who are profoundly socially and politically marginalized as poor gay blacks and latino/as would be particularly heartening. Whatever the desirability of that achievement, though, it is by no means clear that it actually occurs in the drag-ball context-that, in other words, the effective subjectivity exercised by the ball queens in the overhauling of their appearances constitutes such sociopolitical agency as would be entailed in the "constructing of their identities." For this latter agency implies a capacity not only to style one's aspect but to exercise some control over the conditions of its general reception. However much they might enjoy such a capacity in the ballroom, the subjects of Paris Is Burning were definitively shown to lack it beyond the ball context when they attempted to redefine the terms of the film's success.
Pose Bad
Pose’s radical potential is compromised by its obsession with presenting white people as saviors and uses its actors as shields from broader criticism about the shows whiteness
Martin Jr. 18, Alfred L. Martin Jr. is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at University of Iowa. Martin’s research focuses on race, sexuality, and media industries. Martin is currently completing work on his book The Queer Politics of Black-Cast Sitcoms which will be published in late 2019/early 2020 by Indiana University Press., Pose(r): Ryan Murphy, Trans and Queer of Color Labor, and the Politics of Representation, 8/2/18//ATW
This is the space where Murphy’s Pose first encounters issues. The “quality” discourse that surrounds it always already intimates that the imagined audience is white, middle class and financially well off (or at least stable), and not one that is, what I have called elsewhere a BLAMP, or black, liberal, affluent, metropolitan professional audience. In this way, then, it is free to engage with pathologizing discourses about race. In the pilot episode, one of the series’ leading characters, Damon Richards, a young black gay man with a passion for dance, is thrown out of his home by his father, a move that is endorsed by his mother. There are, sadly, many young LGBT youth who are rejected by their families and are either forcibly removed from the familial home or choose to leave it because of the conditions therein. However, in Murphy’s hands, this trope seems to only play out when there are characters of color involved. On Glee, while Kurt’s father almost immediately grabs a rainbow flag and heads down to PFLAG, Santana’s abuela is fiercely anti-lesbian. I am aware that such action serves as a narrative catalyst, but given the ways people of color generally, and black people specifically, are stereotyped as anti-gay, that Pose is largely imagined as a show for white, cisgender folks is problematic. White folks (largely) hold the belief that black folks (as a monolithic group) are anti-gay (forgetting that anti-gay legislation, which often gets codified into law, is spearheaded by white, often male, politicians). Because of this belief, the beginning of the episode is understood as a narrative catalyst. Pose uses the mythology that people of color are anti-gay to re-tether and reify such a pathology that can be observed across news and entertainment media. Part of the ease with which Murphy can engage with such discursive treatment of queers of color is via casting. While Murphy seemed to eschew verisimilitude when casting wheelchair-bound Artie on Glee with an able-bodied actor, or his choice to cast heterosexual actor Justin Bartha as one half of a gay couple on The New Normal, Pose was approached differently. Instead of falling back on what Kristen Warner calls the “best actor discourse”—the entertainment industry’s insistence that when casting any role, the best actor is sought, regardless of race, gender, sexuality or ability—Ryan Murphy thought the politics of representing queer and trans people of color was too great to be handed to heterosexual actors of color donning gayface and transface. Murphy’s interest in casting queer and trans actors of color can be read as merely satisfying demands for inclusion without actually challenging the larger structural and systemic labor issues. As I have documented elsewhere, casting directors who are engaged to cast gay roles (wrongly) insist that they cannot ask an actor’s sexual orientation or gender identity. However, even if that were true, it seems queer that casting director Alexa L. Fogel would “just happen to” be able to find queer and trans actors who both identify as such and happen to be deemed “best” by whatever nebulous criteria the best actor is judged. I argue here, as I have elsewhere, that such casting decisions, while wonderful, financially and professionally, for out LGBT actors of color who might not otherwise find work within a big-budget productions, are subterfuge. These gay and trans actors of color function as a shield for Pose’s problematic representational politics. Jeremy Butler has argued that actors, the characters they play and their “star texts” become inextricably linked within audience reception practices. As such, if one expresses disapproval of any of Pose’s LGBT characters, it could be construed as a critique of actors. Such a set of discursive practices functions to quiet criticism of such characterizations in a media environment in which representation of LGBT bodies (not to mention raced LGBT bodies) remains precarious. A second way Pose attempts to shield itself from criticism is via the involvement of trans activist Janet Mock as a writer and producer for the series. Fascinatingly, Pose

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