Burning: Theorizing The Gender System In Ballroom Culture

Paris is Burning is a documentary that serves as a time capsule for the hardships, marginalization, and oppression that black and Latin LGBTQ+ individuals were forced to endure and rise above in the 1980s in New York. An attempt and method of ‘rising above’ this societal subjugation was through ballroom culture. Ballroom culture and houses served not only as a means for self-expression, but also as a safe space. Houses allowed for family-like dynamics and support for those whose biological family was either unwilling or unable to provide such, as well as a physically safe location in which to express the person they wanted to be but could not safely project, let alone celebrate, in the outside world. Ballroom culture generated a sense of belonging for vulnerable persons- vulnerability that stemmed from gender, class, sexuality, and/or racial

Bailey in 2011 that analyzes ballroom culture. It differs from Paris is Burning in that the documentary discusses more of the subjective culture, motivations, and lives of people of involved in ballroom, while Bailey’s article homes in on the way in which ballroom culture allowed for methods to avoid discrimination and threat in the urban sphere, as well as the way in which gender, class, race, and sexuality intersect and impacted ballroom as a whole. The article details the gendered system in ballroom culture that served as the foundation for how gender and sexuality is conceptualized and expressed. Bailey also elaborates on the specificities of the categories and criterion of the actual balls, as well as the lexicon of these events. Lastly, strategies that members of the ballroom utilized to negotiate the danger of being a nonconformist person in New York in the 80s were detailed, including traveling places in groups, joining a house and getting advice from wiser members (i.e. mothers), and lastly,