Abstract
This article examines the ways in which Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) members of the Ballroom community create black queer space to contend with their spatial exclusion from and marginalization within public and private space in urban Detroit, Michigan. Existing in most urban centers throughout North America, Ballroom culture is a community and network of Black and Latina/o LGBT people. In this ethnography, I delineate the multiple functions of two mutually constitutive domains of Ballroom culture, kinship (the houses) and ritualized performance (the ball events). I use queer theories of geography and draw from Sonjah Stanley Niaah's notion of performance geography to examine the generative socio-spatial practices that Ballroom members deploy to forge alternative possibilities for Black LGBT life in Detroit. In many ways, members of the Ballroom community work to challenge and undo the alienating and oppressive realities of built environments in urban centers by undertaking the necessary social and performance labor that allow its members to revise and reconfigure exclusionary and oppressive spatial forms.
Translated title of the contribution | Engendering space: Ballroom culture and the spatial practice of possibility in Detroit |
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Original language | Spanish |
Pages (from-to) | 489-507 |
Number of pages | 19 |
Journal | Gender, Place and Culture |
Volume | 21 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Apr 2014 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- black queer space
- kinship
- performance ethnography
- performance geography
- socio-spatial practices
- spatial marginalization
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Gender Studies
- Demography
- Cultural Studies
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)