Performativity\u27s moment: Vogue, queer video production, and theoretical discourse

Performativity\u27s Moment: Vogue, Queer Video Production, and Theoretical Discourse examines filmic depictions of voguing, a dance form from Harlem\u27s queer subculture that rose to mainstream popularity circa 1990, and voguing\u27s persistent association with contemporaneous performativity theory, particularly that of Judith Butler\u27s 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. While the ubiquitous scholarly focus on performativity speaks to voguing\u27s significance as a touchstone for histories of theoretical discourse in the early 1990s, voguing\u27s larger significance within queer visual cultures has been insufficiently explicated. Through case studies of Jennie Livingston\u27s Paris Is Burning (1990), Marlon Riggs\u27 Tongues Untied (1989), and Rashaad Newsome\u27s voguing videos from 2008 to the present, Performativity\u27s Moment examines voguing as a means of self-presentation, as a conceptual and aesthetic framework, and as a proxy for rhetorical strategies surrounding performativity\u27s moment. Using the words of ballroom community members, visual records of ballroom history, and the historiography of ballroom\u27s entrance into academic literature, Performativity\u27s Moment considers ballroom community theorization as a key influence in the development and revision of gender performativity theory, culture wars discourse, and popular notions of identity formation and performance. Examination of these materials reveals that ballroom theory and practice offer an embodied, subcultural critique of the notions of gender, self, and identity so crucial to the circa 1990 moment. In particular, voguing\u27s emphasis on stilling and framing the body embody and abstract ballroom\u27s practices of self-definition and self-representation while complicating easy correlations between ballroom, performativity theory, and culture wars discourse. Consideration of Paris Is Burning suggests that its depiction of voguing shows an embodied critique of the conditions of performance, while voguing in Tongues Untied proves to critique the oppositional politics of the culture wars through a radically open vision of community. Finally, Rashaad Newsome\u27s work manifests the developments in voguing and in ballroom community traditions of the decades post 1990, while signifying on voguing\u27s ongoing relationship with performativity\u27s moment