CTSJ 330 Ballroom. Renaissance. Pose. Werk.

This course interrogates the proliferation of ballroom culture in 20th and 21st century America.  Students will examine the historical formation of ballroom and black queer culture in mid 20th century Harlem, New Orleans, and Chicago and its contemporary formations as sites of objection, life, and black queer radical praxis within black/latino neighborhoods, while also interrogating the commodification of ballroom within popular culture.  Students will consider how ballroom has been circumscribed within the ethnographic (Paris is Burning, the Aggressives, Kiki, & Check It) and the consumptive (Pose, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Real Housewives of Atlanta, and Madonna’s Vogue), while also tracing how ballroom’s reconfigurations of normative gendering, it’s embodied response to quotidian antiblack violence, and it’s repertoire of classed, raced, and sexualized critique exist in excess of how it is spectacularized and consumed.  The course offers students a complex site through which to consider how race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect and to interrogate how black queerness and transness have become central to what we know as “popular culture.”