UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE

Dance 260K: Dance Pleasure Sex Gender: Choreographies of Intimacy and Identity
Professor Melissa Templeton

The Queens call it Reading

Intimately Penetrating into the Ineffable Choreographic Improvisations of Vogue

Cuauhtmoc Peranda
12/17/2016

In Improvisation in African-American Vernacular Dancing, Cleis Albeni makes the argument

for looking at improvisation, as choreography. This claim sets in motion the precedent to
examine not only how dance studies examines and valuates the composition of dance, but also
how dance composes its subject matterhow that subject matter is danced. This original
research paper seeks to examine how dance composes the subject matter of the voguer. More
specifically, the contemporary practice of voguing will be investigated as a discursive cluster of
knowledge which theorizes and produces in its dancing how gender and desire can be not only
represented through this improvisational technique, but also makes a claim that gender and desire
are compositions in lived experience. By also looking at voguing as a dance practice embodying
the Black Radical Tradition, this paper will make the case for voguing as a resistive and
disruptive practice to western European thought and ordered.
1. Vogue Deoxyribonucleic Acid: gene expression, artistic expression, and the Other.

This is a preface. A pick up beat before the song, before the concert begins. An

introduction to the work I am doing: this is an introduction to the introduction. Writing

metaphorically, this is the outside protein layer of the chromosome, where beneath it lays the big,

long, and complex molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid: DNA.

I have come to write this essay out of a need to explore the improvisational power of

voguing. Being a voguer myself, of the Butch Queen Vogue Femme with a Twist category1, and

an artist playing with the theatrical potential of luscious vogue choreography2, I wanted to think

deeper into the possibilities of this dance form. I wanted an essay as a meditation of what vogue

could teach me.

Vogue, as a dance form that comes out of Rikers Island Prison, in New York City3,

through the golden age of hip hop, but practiced primarily in hidden and protected spaces of

LGBT Latinx and BlaQ peoples4, has a rich and layered history to its choreographies. For many

of us voguers, the dance holds within it a secret knowledge of quareness5 that enables us to bring

1
This essay with draw upon my field notes that collected through critical performance ethnographya method
described by D. Soyini Madison, in Critical Ethnography, chapter 7: 165-208. Though many of my notes have been
collected before my graduate coursework, I have revisited them with a critical reflective lens, in order to ethnically
represent the information given to me by my informants , and from my own observations of myself. Butch Queen is
a Gay or Bisexual cis-gendered male. Vogue Femme is the newest technique of voguing, which is utilizes
techniques of waacking and Old Way Vogue to bring forth more femme choreographic fragments in performance.
With a Twist refers to a category of competition, in which the walker must first perform their category to their
gender, and then instantly switch to an opposite gender, thereby twisting the performance.
2 Field Notes: I have begun to play with putting voguing on the proscenium stagea place very unfamiliar to

voguing (voguing is normally performed on a runway). In order to do so, I have collected and reconfigured the
technique of vogue femme to accommodate tools of modern dance, which allows the choreography to adapt to a
large space, with a only a frontal orientation.
3 Cleis Abeni, Excavating the Social in Black Vernacular & Hip Hop-Era Dancing, Christena Lindborg Schlundt

Lecture in Dance Studies. Lecture (University of California at Riverside, Performance Lab Arts 166: 4/08/16).
4 Latinx and BlaQ are gender inclusive terms that also provide ethnic identification. Latinx refers to peoples who

have roots from Latin America. BlaQ refers to LGBTQ peoples of the African diaspora.
5 Johnson, E. Patrick. Quare Studies, or (almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned
from My Grandmother. Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001): 125. Johnson uses the term
quare as an expansion, and also a particular locating, of LGBTQ experiences. Queer as a term for all
LGBTQ studies, has historically focused on white cis-mens and cis-womens experiences, aesthetics,
and knowledge. Johnson proposes a use of quare studies, as a term to reference the contextual ways

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 1
forth our realness6. In slang, its often called: the gay dance.7 By mixing movements, or

choreographic fragments8, form quotidian signatures normally organized for separate sexes,

voguing produces a queer feeling when dance, while simultaneously challenging, transgressing,

and subverting the limits of gender.

As I dance vogue, I feel, as though I am learning from my queer ancestors, how to be me,

love myself, and how to become strong and resilient against the homophobia of society.9

This aspect of voguing has been described before in the field of performance studies,

most notably by Jos Esteban Muoz. In Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Freeing: Approaching

Kevin Aviance, of Cruising Utopia, Muoz writes that queer dancing, or dancing that is

performed by and around queers, or in the spaces they inhabit, are material objects that transform

into ephemera.10 These ephemera leave a trace, a mark, in the space, and on/in the bodies of the

dancers and witnesses. And it is this mark, this trace, that yields the precious queer feeling, and

thus knowledge, that queer life exists and is valid.11

people of color experience being LGBTQ. I deploy it as a short-hand term to speak to the Queer and
Trans* People of Color experiences and critiques.
6 Judith Butler, in Gender is Burning, defines realness as a standard that is used to judge any given performance
within the established categories [of the ball]. [] what determines the effect of realness is the ability to compel
belief, to produce the naturalized effect of the category (341). From my field notes, this holds as one aspect of
realness, but it is also: 1) the ability to not be read (pass), 2) a category of competition in the ball, 3) a chosen lived
quotidian identity, 4) ones belief of their true selffollowing an essentialist belief system.
7 Field notes: 04/12/2008
8 Wendy Rogers, Department of Dance presents: Professor Wendy Rogers Graduation to Emerita status. Colloquium

(University of California at Riverside, Performance Lab Arts 166: 11/16/16). Professor Rogers stated that she
finds her movements for composing dances, as coming from an archive deep in her mind, and in her body. Most of
these movements are not in a full dance form, but are easily accessible to her as fragments that can be arranged
into dance, for choreography or improvisation. They are more than gestures, and but less than a phrase, an so she
has named these choreographic fragments.
9 Mary Annet Pember, Trauma may be woven into the DNA of Native Americans. Indian Country Media Network.

Web periodical (5/28/2016). Pember cites a few Sociological, Psychological, Spiritual, and Ethnic Studies articles
to show proof that historical trauma is passed down from generation to generation, in the DNA.
10 Jose Esteban Muoz, Cruising Utopia: 81.
11 I am taking some rhetorical liberties from the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which fights against police

brutality in our country, and promotes the importance, and validity of Black life. Since its emergence, other
hashtages have been created with similar advocacy, such as: #BlackTransLivesMatter and #DisabledLivesMatter.
The rhetoric is generalizable, to state, that a population is important an necessary simply for existing.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 2
 This sort of ephemeral trace is an utterly necessary aspect of queer life and survival, as it

is a way of evidencing life, without the classic physical trace, that can be tracked to living

corporealities. An untraceable trace is exactly what was, and still is, needed as queer peoples fall

under the threat of violence and death for loving and living as they do. But before, and inside, the

ephemera, inside the gestures, inside the choreographic fragments, and inside the dance of

vogue, there exist a quare knowledge where this essay shall begin.

Muoz writes that voguing, in its special association with queer culture, holds

knowledge often gone unnoticed, unread. Perhaps this is because of a lack of dance literacy, but

more likely, there is a level of dance literacy in vogue that is only understood by quare people.

And so for the wider, general heteronormative 12 others, the dance goes unread, and unnoticed.

The dialectical exchange of vogue language is designed to be privateagain, in order to pass by

undetected, and thus not persecuted by violence. Pointing future scholars to the knowledge inside

vogue, on page 80, Muoz writes:

Voguing, for instance, is too often considered a simplistic celebration of black

queer culture. It is seen as a simple appropriation of high fashion or other aspects

of commodity culture. I am proposing that we might see something other than a

celebration in these moves--the strong trace of black and queer radical survival,

the way in which children need to imagine becoming Other in the face of

conspiring cultural logics of white supremacy and heteronoramtivity. [] while a

short-sighted viewer of Aviances voguing might see only the approximation of

12Roderick A. Ferguson, in Aberrations in Black: towards a Queer of Color Critique, defines that Heteronormativity as
the possession, or the identification within the practice, policy, policing, and regulations of the western European
Capitalist patriarchal system of regulating of society. This is often a quality of those who identify as heterosexual
white cis-men or cis-women.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 3
 high-fashion glamour as he moves and gestures on the stage, others see/hear

another tune, one of racial self-enactment in the face of overarching opposition

An investigation into becoming Other, imagining it, dancing it, voguing it, and creating a radical

self-enactment choreographically, is where this essay will begin. Instead of focusing on the

material culture of the Ballroom Scene, and specific Queer and Trans* People of Color

(QTPOC), this essay dives into the DNA of vogue: the ephemeral and choreographic fragments

that make up vogue. It is in the DNA, in the deep negotiation of what to dance next, in

improvisational dance performance, that this essay will set as its site for exploration.

Such deep cutting and yanking at the inner workings of vogue can be painful,

problematic, and traumatic. It is a history of anthropology, and further dance anthropology, that

has subjugated indigenous people, Black people, and many non-European to unethical

violencewhich then in turn has often validating genocide.13 To harm another would be

unscholarly, and would invalidate this work. Instead, this essay is written like the double helix of

DNA. It will have two narratives lines that eventually come together. One of these lines is from

my own experience as an artist and voguer, and the other looks to my performance ethnographic

field notes that I have collected over seven years, in combination with scholarly texts. The

weaving of these two narratives should give some sense to the complexity of decoding dance,

onto paper. And, the weaving should show how much information our bodies are able to process,

beyond the frontal cortex thinkingwhere the assumed consciousness lays. The body of this

paper, then, uses the metaphor of the DNA code, in order to embody the research into this essay.

13Tara Browner, in Heartbeat of the People, cites Franz Boas critique of the field of Anthropology as non-inclusive
to the ideologies of other cultures, in his proposal for cultural relativism. This begins the transition from
Anthropology as a academics study with a colonial orientation, to a study of contextual cultural development of
peoples in a certain geographies and topographies: 7.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 4
Following the work Muoz, this essay will have two beginnings; but I have also added this

preface.

Lastly, each section of this essay, will have its own focus. Some will be more expressive

than others, and some will set up future segments (genes) for better expression. In this way, the

essay itself is a metaphoric example of a biological fact: genes, though (currently) unchangeable

after conception, can be activated or deactivated from expression, by their environment. Trauma,

stress, toxicity, care, and affection, can affect whether a gene is active and present, or not.

Looking at the activation/performance of gene expression, artistic expression, vogue expression,

and realness, as mirroring parallel apparatuses14, is the way this essay will speak to how voguing

helps QTPOC transform, and live outside the rules of society: to become the Other in order to

survive. But more, this essay will show how queer ephemera warps space into refuge for these

expressions to be enabled to activate. This is the secret workings of sending15 in quare life; this is

how quare life is lived.

2. Lets Start at the BeginningNina Simone16

14 Michael J. Morris, in Orientations as Materializations, provides the definition for apparatus that I will use
throughout this essay, which stems from the work of Karen Barad: Apparatuses are practices or performances
through which materialization is enacted. They are choreographies that do not merely organize but also produce
the relations through which agential bodiesboth human and non-humanemerge.: 486.
15 Adam Fitzgerald and Fred Moten, An interview with Fred Moten, Part 1, Lit Hub (8/5/2015). Moten defines

sending with this story: My grandmother used to love Kojak. Id say, Mimi why you love Kojak so much? Shed
say, He just sends me. And it was the only time I ever had anybody, the only time I ever knew anybody to use
the word in that way that, you know, Sam Cooke uses it in a song. Its kinda one of those terms thats maybe even
archaic when he says it. But theres that sense of being sent, you know. And thats what I mean to be sent, to be
transported out of yourself, its an ecstatic experience, its not an experience of interiority, its an experience
of exteriority, its an exteriorization. And so were sent. Were sent to one another. We are sent by one another to
one another. To the point that, by the time you get to work that shit out as well as it should be worked out, were
sent by one another to one another until one and another dont signify anymore.
16 At the top of Nina Simones performances, she often asked her audiences where to beginperforming a

rhetorical question to demonstrate the overwhelming issues of racism in the world, and innumerable possibilities
of musical performance to address those issues. For her, it was often best to start at the beginning, her earliest
songs, such as: I love you Porgy. What Happened Miss Simone? , Directed by Liz Garbus. Netflix. (6/24/2016)

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 5
This article has two beginnings, and one conclusion. It starts at my own journey to discover who

I am, and what I like, which has now transformed into a practice of asking what is my

practice?, as a way to generate work, but also constantly try to create in a better way of

working17--and sometimes not at all work. This start was the beginning of my journey into the

critical and reflexive practice of dance studies, but more, it was my entry way into a critical

practice with the arts of choreography and performance.

Until I began my questioning of the power of performance and choreography, I more or

less ignored the performing arts as extra to society--a frivolous thing that needed no academic or

intellectual attention. But, it was the question to dance of what it was, or what it could be, and

especially, how it could control and distribute power that ignited an obsessive curiosity dance

into dancing communities.

It was the questioning, the experimentation of choreography, the trial and error of

hypothesis of authenticity and passing in performance of dance, to the result of success and

admiration, that became my primary thought in the ocean of my daily thoughts. Questioning,

what if, and what if not, sparked my imagination into the limits, and perhaps breaks (as Fred

Moten would put it18), to the rules and terms of our ordering of ourselves.19 It was this thinking,

17
John Cage provided a guide, the 10 rues for students and teachers, as a helpful handout to those who may be
struggling to stay motivated in education, or their work. RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined: this means finding
someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-
disciplined is to follow in a better way. Here, I am playing with this rule, and which includes, allowing for its
failure to materialize.
18 Fred Moten, In the Breaks: the Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis and London: University of

Minnesota press, 2003). In reference to the work of Cedric Robinson, Moten states that Black radicalism cannot
be understood in the context of its origin is true, and it cannot be understood outside of its context either (24), the
break, is a moving with and from the context of origin of Black music and culture, in search of new, and urgently
vital analytics.
19
In Cedric J. Robinsons Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, make the case that the way
in which we have come to understand the terms and identities of our society have been constructed to limit our
ability to imagine new ways of existing in the world. It was through my question of authority, by the imagination of
possibilities through choreography, that I began to apply critical thinking to the rule and order what I knew to be
life. In this book Robison shows, that we are raised and disciplined to relinquish power to those signified as
authority, and to destroy imagination because it is a frivolous practice. Robinson calls for a reexamination and

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 6
this practice of wondering, through my body, and in my mind, as to who I really am, or what I

could be, that enabled me to explore what identity is, could be, and has been.

This was my beginning, a scientific and artistic exploration of identity. Moving through

elementary school and secondary school, I had thought I understood my role in society, and who

I was supposed to become. I never wondered if perhaps, there were limits, regulations, and

influences set upon me as to who I should become. As my hidden queerness emerged in college

at Stanford University, I began to understand, that my future, and myself, is my own. I began to

find and construct my radical and radiant queer self. But, reworking the structure of society to

work for me, was confusing and difficult. When I wanted the experiment to be over, the machine

kept on moving.20 So I found a safe place in the sweet tea of people of color.21

3. Another Beginning

The voguers are fierce in the House of Revlon. They are sharp, complex, and precise with

their movements. But what separates them from other houses, is not their technique, but their

bravery in its execution. Revlons have cartwheeled into splits, and twist spined newway up the

runway. It was hard to tell if there was salt water taffy coming down a conveyer belt, or if that

was indeed a voguer strolling down the runway.

restructuring of the terms of order by which we livethere needs to be a critical interrogation and restructuring
at the level of thought.
20 Robert Young, in Colonial Desires: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, in Colonialism and the Desiring

Machine, identifies the desiring machine to the discourse created to validate and perpetuate the unethical
colonialism, while also wanting sexual intimacy with the exotic other. Taking from Marxisms critical analytic of
the capitalist machinery, the machine is a term to describe a process of ideology, that take over itself, and
consumes everything until its death by implosion. As my experiment continued, I soon was unable to dictate its
order, and it fell to the control of my peers. The experiment itself became a machine, which sought to invisibilized
me through too many names, denying an existence of any identifier. This violence enacted onto myself, forced me
to find asylum in QTPOC spaces, which resist the oppressive powers of labeling through decolonial praxis of
working in and from the ineffable:164.
21 E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, an oral history (Chapel Hill: the University of North

Carolina Press, 2008). Well, in the black gay vernacular, tea is not just a staple beverage of the South. Indeed,
the word is often used as a euphemism for gossip, as in, Chile, spill the tea or Pour the tea! or Chile, I have
some SWEET tea to pour (17). For this essay, I am using tea as both signifier of gossip, play, and the exchange of
stories that have a healing decolonial effect, alike indigenous medicinal teas.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 7
 Perhaps most exemplary of the Revlons bravery, was the Love to Love Ball in Oakland,

2009, where Mother Revlon of Oakland, vogued through the crowd into the runway, over her

opponents, onto the judges table, and dipped so hard, the table snapped in two. The whole room

erupted in cheers, shouts of joy, with snaps and hollars. As a collective, we came to this moment

of praise, and also relief, by following the tension and build-up created by the MC, voguer, and

audiences; this architecture of suspense, burst into flames. Mother Revlon choreographed our

energies, while simultaneously performing a break into freedom of and approximation of

attention-distraction: her statement of herself.

From this wreckage of 2009, she fabulously got up, with hair intact, and cat walked in

celebration of her undeniable victory, to the table where her House of Revlons gathered along

the runway, as all Houses do. Satisfied with her performance and victory, the House of Infinity

had to look for a new table, before the face competitions could begin, and after that, virgin

voguers. Balls, like the people who create them, are unpredictable, and always recreating the

possibilities of the Ballroom Scene. Following her fierceness, her Femme Queen realness, the

improvisation of vogue, sent us to a new place of exhilaration.

4. What is this? Look at this!

This essay explores how identity is formed, by not only the expression and repeated

performances of the individual22, but too, the conditions of collectivity which support the

expansion, critical questioning, and expression of new method of identification.

22This idea stems from Judith Butlers work in Bodies That Matter, which proposes that the identity of a sex or
gender to be thought of as sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice (10). By the repeating of previous
performance of sexual identity, there is an effect of naturalization. This practice can be extrapolated to all identity
formations.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 8
 In the end of my freshman year at Stanford, I began to play with performance, and allow

my nicknames to become individual characters, or modes of performance. The impetus of this

expression and experiment had always been to see what name worked best for me. Additionally,

I questioned if my personality changed with the change in names. Moreover, I wanted to know if

I was able to create different passable characters out of myself, new identities, sexualities,

experiences, by embodying new frameworks, or sets of conditions, by which to enact the

quotidian.23 I was not sure, but I knew that this idea, this experiment, had to be explored.

Internally, it was a quest to find out what other saw within me. Externally, it was a quest to see

how I could use the tools of choreographic composition of coursework, in my daily lifeand to

see, perhaps, from where these tools of dance composition may have emerged.

What I discovered, is that in naming, we make whatever we associate with that name real

in the material. More, we expand the possibilities of what or who is being signified by the

name.24 Moreover, we limit the possibilities of what can be contained in that name. Temo was a

sweet student, while Koko was a mean cultural criticbut both were me. As I continued with

my experiment, and grew to accumulate over 20 names, I realized, I was no longer identifiable

through a common name that everyone called me. Instead, I would be called Leo, Temo, Tiemo,

Cuauhtemoc, Cuah, Chief, and Koko in one conversation with a group of people. I was instead

identified corporeally. My closest peer, though did not know me by a common name, saw my

body, and its movements, as the signature or stamen of who I am. Into the ineffable is where I

could not diverge from myself. Though I desired to see if I could become another through

identity, my unspeakable realness always came through.

23 Michel De Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, speaks to the quotidian (the everyday), as a collection of
images, or representations, that enact cultural values, which control or regulate our expressions. Though De
Certeau is concerned with the interrogation of representations, my experiment was less about conducting a
deconstruction my representational elements, but more was a focus on the creation of new identities using parts of
already deconstructed representations: xiii.
24 Michel Foucault, What is an Author, Lecture. College of France (o2/22/1969)

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 9
5. You, 2, I see

As Mother Revlon taught a special voguing workshop at Stanford, she spoke about how

voguing saved her life. It was through the dancing that she as able to express who she really was,

and how she felt.

As she danced in front of me, I could see the mixing and combination of movement

fragments to create a sort of quare fierce aesthetic that I identify as voguing--but more, I began to

see that these choreographic fragments as not just bits of memory of past movements done

before, possibly in a dance class. Voguings pedagogy, like most hiphop forms25, does not

operate like that. Instead, what was also being created, woven into the fabric of the technique of

voguing, was life--Mother Revlon's lifes movements, and Mother Revlon experiences. It was at

that observation, that I remembered that in order to Vogue Femme, you had to vogue like a

Femme Queen: a transgender woman. This meant dancing from a repertoire of embodiment that

may be unknown to ones lifes experience. More, this meant dancing as a gender outside of the

binary of male and female. Voguing, then, can too be understood as a practice of sharing

corporealities. And, with that sharing of the lived bodies, comes with it, great responsibility to

not dishonor the Queer and Trans People of Color ancestors, and present ball walkers.

6. Walk for me: Cover-girl! Put some face in your walk!26

25Cleis Abeni, in Excavating the Social in Black Vernacular & Hip Hop-Era Dancing, makes the case for
voguing to be a part of the larger umbrella of hip hopstating that it emerged at the same time, and
follow the same core element of hip hop culture, just with a queer twist, or aesthetic.
26I am borrowing for Rupaul Charles song Supermodel, which makes a call for any model to be sure to put facial
expressions in their performance of walking the runway. I cite this song, to show how, in the BlaQ culture, there
are calls and responses that make up the performances. More, this is a direct example of how the technique of
walking requires the walker, to transform themselves, beyond the simple task of pedestrian locomotion.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 10
 (For a moment, this essay requires grounding in some theoretical approaches to

materialization and experience. The section (gene) of the essay will now venture into the queer

world of ecosexuality. But, this section will return to vogue by its conclusion. This is a short

detour, a walk, a stroll, to find something lost in the history of voguing...)

Looking to the work of feminist phenomenologist Karen Barad, from the perspective of

Michael J. Morris Orientations as Materializations, we see a different approach to experience

than previous philosophers have proposed. Instead of looking at phenomenology, and its

phenomena, as individual perspectives and experiences, Barad proposes that, there are

intermingled and entangled with other aspects of existence. For Morris, Barads work was the

bedrock of his theorization of the Love Art Laboratory, and his examination of Ecosexuality.

This idea of entanglement was necessary in order to discuss how one might interact with the

environment and its ecologyand how each (the human (ecosexual), and the earth/specific

ecosystem/ecology) may give consent, acting with their own agency, retaining their

individuality, while simultaneously unifying through performances of marriage. To provide

clarity, Morris quotes Barads work:

The primary ontological unit is not independent objects with inherent boundaries

and properties, but rather phenomena. In my agential realist elaboration,

phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of observer and

observed, or the result of measurement; rather, phenomena are the ontological

inseparability/entanglement of intra-acting agencies.27

This viewpoint of phenomena, or moments of experience, as multi-valence inter-acting agencies,

helps to complicate the notion of a performer and the object. The ecosexual is not starting anew,

an interaction with an unconscious or non-sentient being, devoid of agency, but rather is

27 Michael J. Morris, Orientations and Materializations: 485.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 11
engaging a-new with a familiar (and already a part of the ecosexual) ecology with its own

agency.

In many ways, Barads word could also be described as Indigenous Knowledge28, which

sees all material and non-material aspect of existence and experience as entangled intra-acting

agencies to the selves.29 This sort of parallel demonstrates the issue and violence of indigenous

invisiblization and colonization, as well as a trend for contemporary philosophers to be re-write

what people of color have known for centuries. That said, this way of thinking of ones

interaction with the world is vastly different than the logics and reason of western European

political philosophy and capitalists economy. It stands in stark opposition to seeing material

resources as non-agent objects, and the immaterial as frivolous play in epistemology. Thus, the

stakes are high in this orientation of thought, and this orientation of our corporealities.

In order for Morris to fully describe how the ecosexuality is enacted and experienced, he

had to examine Barads ideas of the Performative and the Apparatus. For Barad, the

performative could be described in the methodology of scientists:

a performative understanding of scientific practice, for example, takes account of

the fact that knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing

but rather form a direct material engagement with the world. [] A performative

account makes an abrupt break from representationalism that requires rethinking

28 Cuauhtmoc Peranda, in MITOTE: A manifesto for Avant-Garde Dance Written in Indigenous Knowledge, provides
references from (the Native American Studies Journal) American Indian Quarterlys special issue on Recovering
Indigenous Knowledge, and makes the claim that Indigenous Knowledge refers to a political orientation, a
philosophical optic of critique, and a life practice; not unlike feminism.
29 Cuauhtmoc Peranda, in MITOTE. Peranda demonstrates how Indigenous Knowledge sees the person as a

collective of many ancestors and future children. More, two-spirit people see the self as always plural, as a house
which inhabits two or more spirits of different genders. By this thinking, it is appropriate to refer to oneself in the
plural.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 12
 of the nature of a host of fundamental notions such as being, identity, matter,

discourse, causality, dynamics, and agency, to name a few.30

Thus, the performative account directly places evidence of knowing and understanding in the

embodied interaction with the inter-acting agency. For Barad, the performance and its following

performative account, are entangled and inseparable. But more importantly they each influence

the other, and therefore each are in constant evolution, and accumulation of phenomena. Barad

goes further to define this interaction as not only phenomena, but specifically as an apparatus.

Morris states that Barad defines an apparatus as

specific material configurations, or rather, dynamic (re)configurations of the

world through which bodies are intra-actively materialized [] [it is a] practice of

mattering though which intelligibility and materiality are constituted (486).

This then means that an apparatus can be defined as practices of performance by which

materialization is enacted; or as this essay pushes, ephemeras are generated. More, Barad makes

the case for the power of the apparatus to be able to (re)configure the world, and (re)create

intelligent and material multi-valence bodies. It is with this perspective of phenomenology, that

Morris is able to define the performances of marriage ceremonies to specific ecologies, by the

ecosexuals, as an apparatus which enables and defines the performative accounts for the humans

and the specific ecology.

Voguing can be seen as an apparatus defined by Barad, explained by Morris. The two

performing bodies of intra-acting agencies would therefore be 1) the voguer and 2) the vogue

fragments of choreography (otherwise referred to as the vogue technique). Looking to again to

the work of Jos Esteban Muoz, the queer dancing of voguing produces non-material ephemera,

a queer feeling, that brings forth an everlasting mark on the dancer and the queer dance literate

30 Michael J. Morris, Orientations and Materializations: 486.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 13
witnesses. But, what is missing from Muozs work, is how ephemera is recycled into material

performance: while the voguer is performing the dance, vogue is for a moment materialized from

previously gathered or accumulated queer ephemera. This is done by retrieving the repertoire of

choreographic fragments that are composed into vogue improvisationally. It is this

materialization that demonstrates the articulation of two intra-active agencies. Just as the

ecosexual, and the ecology, grow, evolve, and are change by a marriage ceremony, so are the

voguer and vogue technique (the specific dance technique) changed by each other through

voguing (dancing).

The issue, and confusion, of course, is that dances are not seen or understood as

possessing any sort of agencybecause dance has to be danced to exist.31 Dance is therefore

seen as an object dependent on a subjectand though may possess some sort of materialism, it is

not considered to have a life of its own. Though Indigenous Knowledge knows that each dance

has its own life and agency, such a proposition is new and unsettling. It is because of this uneasy

feeling that this essay turns to Morris use of Sara Ahmeds expansion on the discourse of

sexuality and orientations.

While Morris deploys the work of Sara Ahmed in order to describe the ecosexuals

sexual interaction with the assumed agency-devoid-object (a specific ecology), this essay pushes

to use Ahemed work to describe the interaction between voguer and vogue technique. But, this

essay proposes a bypass of sexuality, in order to view the interactions as intimacy. Because the

voguer dances voguing through an intimate embodiment, an idea of sexuality is superfluous to

the voguer and the vogue techniquewhereas it is necessarily defined between the ecosexual

31In Susan Sontags, The Dancer and the Dance, she makes the claim that the dance is inseparable to the dancer, and
that the dancer themselves is what is seen, and thus known, as the dance. Dance cannot exist without dance
design: choreography. But dance is the dancer. Voguing may be an apparatus of performing vogue, but vogue is
too whatever the dancer chooses it to be in the moment of improvisational performance.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 14
and the specific ecology. Voguing is already a sexual dance, that works in and in-between

sexuality and gender. Thus intimacy is sufficient to categorize this level of interaction. That said,

Morris uses Ahmed to speak to this intimate interaction as an orientation. For Ahmend,

orientations involve direction towards objects that affect what we do, and how

we inhabit space. We move toward and away from objects depending on how we

are moved by them. [] the object is not reducible to the commodity, even when

it is bought and sold: indeed, the object is not reducible to itself, which means it

does not have an itself that is apart from its contact with others. The actions

performed on the object (as well as with the object) shape the object. The object

in turn affects what we do. (487)

This theory of orientation is easily applied to voguing. Vogue is not reducible to itself, as

is contained in the voguer(s). And, as the voguer performs voguing, they are always

moving from and towards the vogue technique, reciting choreographic fragments of the

repertoire, or adding new fragments found through newly accumulated queer ephemera.

As the voguer dances, it is the orientation (intimate interaction) to the vogue technique

that determines how the voguer exists in space. The object, vogue, absolutely affects

what the voguer does; and the voguers performance of voguing shape, and

(re)configures the vogue technique. As Morris puts it, if we take orientation to be an

apparatus for intra-activity that differentially produces object and subjects, we can here

also see how this apparatus is an ongoing (re)configuration in which both the object and

subject participate (487). As voguing (re)creates the voguer, so does the voguer

(re)create voguing.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 15
 This unique property of voguing stems from the tradition of Ledges, Statements

and Stars, otherwise known as LSS. It is a part of the ritual of the Ballroom Scenes

opening of a Ball event. The LSS is a time when all Ballroom Scene participants who

have reached a certain level of status and notoriety (Stars, Icons, Princes/Princesses,

Legendries, Mothers/Fathers) are called upon to walk the runway, and demonstrate their

mastery of their category. That walking is called a statement. It is not prose written down,

and there are no words exchanged; it is a corporeal statement of who they are, through

the movements and showcase of their particular category that they walk in the ball. For

voguers, this means their statement is a choreographic demonstration of not only their

skill in dancing, but also a telling of who they are, how they are feeling, and how they

move. It is because of this, that when the voguer vogues, they (re)create the vogue

technique. What is presented, in a statement, is an original choreographic improvisation

based out of the voguers accumulated ephemera of quare life. And, as the voguer

vogues, they are marked with the quare expression of the ancestral voguerswhich

directly changes the embodied identity of the voguer. This apparatus of voguing, then is a

practice of mattering though which intelligibility and materiality are constituted.32 This

apparatus can be understood as how the voguers know themselves, discover themselves,

and how a witness comes to comprehend who the other is. This apparatus is also, how the

body and its corporeality is validatedwith a record of evidence forever in the

performative account of the queer feeling ephemera.

32 Michael J. Morris, Orientations and Materializations: 486

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 16
7. Intimacy: the you (love) that is mine33; the love that is always (re)discoverable.

Dear body,

As I look at you, I wonder who I am and who I will become. You are my vessel, my

sweet container of all the messiness of life, and vital organs for life. In your deep dark brown

flesh, I know love. I know you are here by love. And, I am here for you, in love. Your secrets are

forever retold to me, as I do not have the capacity to remember all of our apparatuses, nor the

capacity to recall all of our performative accounts. My mind is too primitive. But you, you know

them, you feel them, you keep them: that knowledge; kept in secret crevasse I revisit often. I

always find these places changed. Because you change, as I changewe influence one another.

Though we are a unified person, a unified being, you have an agency that I am only beginning to

understand. And, you have a life that has already outlived my ownand will continue to do so.

You are my elder. You love me. I love you. And we protect each otheryou with all your

wisdom, and me with all my fresh curiosity.

I often wonder what it would be like to be separate from you. I ponder how there could

be negativity between us: any sort of empty space, negative space. I am entangled and enmeshed

in you. You are how I know the world. And thus, through your eyes, and all other senses, is the

only way I intelligibility understand the materiality and immateriality of life.

It is through your achieve of memory, stored in the soma of your flesh, that I have pulled

out my voguing. Seeing, feeling, touching, and reenacting the quotidian dances of the men and

women of my childhood, are all kept in our fingertips, hips, and lips. In more places, in private

33Luce Irigaray, You Who Will Never Be Mine. In this work, Irigaray makes the claim that though we can be
unified in relationships with each other, we can never truly be the other, or inhabit and completely enmesh with
the other. There is always space between the two individuals. However, when referring to oneself, we do know
what it is to be ourselves, but sometimes, there seems to be other selves of us, who are unfamiliar to our
consciousness (which is already understood through Indigenous Knowledge). This section explore what it mean to
speak to the body as separate from cognition or the psyche: the you that is mine.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 17
and public flesh, exists all that I have ever experienced. But, it is by you, my catalytic converter,

that I know my quareness. It is by you that I am able to vogue.

Voguing with you is a praxis of researching youand thereby myself. As I wade through

the collection of choreographic fragments of vogue technique, to compose my statement, or

battle of voguing, quickly, I am swimming in our pasts. I am time traveling: rediscovering our

past, by producing the future. In the moment of the performance of the improvisation of voguing,

time is gathered.

With you, I experience time outside of time. With you, my research for the production of

choreography is a methodology of investigation by dancing. With you I have come to understand

what T. S. Eliot wrote in his Four Quartets, Burnt Norton 1 & 2:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

[...]

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 18
 But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

T. S. Eliots modernist poetry has always been confusing for me, but the more I review it, as a

rejection of time, and internal investigation of himself, I find that it is making a claim for the

importance of the only option for existence: being present in ourselves.

But how do we do that? We do it through dancing, through voguing.

As I vogue with you, I am intimately aware of my lack of a vagina, and the thickness of

my tummy. And yet, I feel cunty34; and yet, I feel sexy. As I moan and thrust across the floor of

the runway, like the horniest of fiends in need of sexual satisfaction, I am satisfied by our unity.

My cuts and strokes of space, my spins and dips to the earth, are our quareness materialized.

Voguing is how I learned to be us.

As I embody the corporeographies35 of our quare ancestors, I am responsible for their

care. We are the keepers of the Ballroom culture, along with all the other children.36 You are the

love that is mine, and I am the they that is love: the radical love of QTPOC resilience.

34 Cuauhtmoc Peranda, in The Doing of Vogue, defines the Ballroom Scenes use of cunty as a queering of the
word, from an overtly annoying and dangerous woman in hysteria, to a as a positive signifier of owning ones
hypersexual-femininity. To be cunty is to enact the power of the vagina, and bring forth female realness: 84.
35 Cuauhtmoc Peranda, To Learn the Kids: Dipping into the genealogy of Voguings pedagogies. CORD+SDHS

Conference, Paper Presentation. Pomona College (11/06/2016). I am using this word, corporeography, to
indicate a kind of embodiment, or trance level of dancing, which stems from the body, not musical
phrases. Here, choreography is defined as a movement system that arranges dance movements into a
composition or phrase. Corporeography, on the other hand, works through improvisation, and is not a
fully conscious process of arranging dance steps into a phrase, but the dancer moves from their sense,
emotions, feelings, and in the moment compose dance movements. While choreography is the

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 19
 Thank you, my sweet body. Thank you for walking for me.

7. And some people maroon themselves on purpose.

When I see voguing, I identify 2 kinds of materialism. The first is what Jose Esteban

Munoz has identified as ephemera, or a queer feeling: that which is left lingering in the air, in the

memory, and in the flesh of those preset to voguing. To me, this kind of materialism is a result of

the logos of an aesthetic of voguing, which I identify as quare fierceness.37 It is an accumulation

of various intersectional gender choreographic fragments, that are assembled in improvisational

performance, to create an expression of gender that is both original (outside our normalized

dance technique expectations), yet within our known human experiences (if prepared with a

quare literacy). It is a reworking, or radical transformational practice of playing with ones

gender; it is defiance, or perhaps a flight away from the Western cultural choreopolicing. 38

As for the second kind of materialism, it is hard for me to even describe--because though

it is there, it is invisible. It is like gravity, or a production of like-gravity, through voguing. It

sucks us up and into the moment of dancing, and sends us out to another world like our, but

critically different from our own. This new place could be what Gloria Anzalda whispers to

arrangement of movements for the body to dance, coporeography acknowledges the arrangement of the
body to produce movements: 18.
36 Cuauhtmoc Peranda, in The Doing of Vogue, defines the Ballroom Scenes use children as an affectionate term
to refer to all Ballroom Scene cultures participants, which includes: Houses, Walkers, and non-initiated audience
members: 84.
37 Fiona Buckland, in Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World Making, states that when one dresses

themselves, in their own tastes of beauty, it is fabulousness. That, in combination [with] playfulness, confidence,
and enjoyment of [ones] body produces fierceness. Thus, fierceness is the enactment, through movement, pride
in ones fashion, and fashioning of themselves: 37.
38Andre Lepecki, in Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the task of the dancer, uses Jacques Rancire's notion
of police to advance the concept of choreopolice, to expand choreography as having normative
constructions of movement that are policed by society (14). I am deploying this term to define the
reality that QTPOC experience as outsiders of heteronormativity; as those who are under constant
threat of policing and brutality by societys need to regulate its citizens into pre-determined expressions
of binary gendered movements.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 20
when describing El Mundo Zurdo: a place of imagination, of dreams.39 Or maybe, its both a

sending and a world making, for those who do not fit in Western American society's rules and

regulations.

It is this second kind of materialism that is one of vogues most precious unidentifiable,

perhaps a disidentified,40 secret. It eludes us, and seeks ineffability. Yet we feel it, and continue

to bring it forth in our voguing. This second materialism, I believe is a reiteration, or

revitalization, of Cedric J. Robinsons identification of marronage, a Black radical tradition of

resistance to colonization and slavery.

Though the marronage practices Robinson firsts identifies were superseded by expanded

plantation slavery, and the defeat of many Indigenous tribes, the practice of hiding away,

marooning oneself, in order to create an alternative free society to Imperialism, was not

exclusive to a time or space.41 From the Caribbean to and through South America, the practice of

marronage could be seen in many Black radical resistance movements. With voguing coming

from Black and Latinx diasporic communities, vogue must have been imbued with a feeling of

the Black radical tradition of creative, resilient resistance that produce opportunities for new

practices, identity, and formations of human collectivity: societies.42

The Ballroom Scene, in both its queerness, and base in people of color, should be seen as

an event, or rehearsal, for marronage. It is a time to practice kinship, family, society, and love

expressions outside the regulations of normalized American culture. And, just as the marronage

39 See Gloria Anzalda, Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers.
40 See Jos Esteban Muoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.
41 See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: the Making of the Black Radical Tradition: 311.
42As Cedric Robinson states in Black Marxism, the resoluteness of the Black radical tradition advances
as each generation assembles the data of its own experience to an ideology of liberation [the] Black
radical tradition is transcending those traditions [of nationalism and class struggle] in order to adhere
to its own authority (317).

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 21
of slave were always under persecution, so are the borderlands of the limits of the spaces the

Ballroom Scenes balls. Queer people of color are still attacked for being who they are--

homophobia is still a very real threatening force to quare life. It can then be inferred that the

practice of marronage emerges out of a necessity for survival. And, it is voguing which holds the

knowledge, and transfers the energy of the Black radical tradition, for this Ballroom Scene

community.

Beyond being both a memory storage device, and a conduit for the transfer of a catalytic

feeling for the reproduction and reiteration of the Black radical tradition, voguing has an

additional ability in its 2nd materialization. The like-gravity described as a metaphor for the

ineffable aspect of voguing in the Ballroom Scene is an invisible force that that draws and binds

people together. This in turn, creates spaces and marronage, beyond the physical. Voguing then,

acts as an apparatus for the storage and transfer of memory, as well as an apparatus for stopping

and navigating space-time. When the Ball occurs, or when we see voguing on YouTube.com, we

are seeing, and participating, in an effort to not only fly away to a world of quare fierceness, but

we are also moving and reshaping space-time so that we can be unified together. Thus the

orientation towards voguing, not only (re)configures the voguer and the vogue technique, but

also (re)configures the worlds we visit, and in which we inhabit.

This aspect of voguing still must be explored. Only recently have I begun to develop a

metaphor, and optic, through science fiction, as the method to comprehend this 2nd

materialization. I describe, metaphorically, this ability of voguing to be a use of transwarp

technology--taking from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. An

attempt at this analysis is: As voguing is performed, it warps space-time, and connects us to

each other by utilizing participatory scores, and its influence over the felt atmospheric pressure

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 22
of the ball. By the sheer intensity by which voguing is performed, the ball is moves out of

warping of space, and into transwarp corridors, otherwise known as wormholes. Though the

shared embodiment and participation in voguing, we connect to balls and voguing in other space

times, entangled with all voguing time-space

Though an investigation into voguings transwarp technology is necessary, the analysis is

beyond the scope of this essay. However, this budding understanding of voguings power to

make us feel as though time-space has shifted, or sends us together, is following a trend in Black

Studies to investigate how quantum physics or cosmology may be effective metaphors, optics, or

mirrors, of what Black life can, and has been produced. Using Robinsons account of the Black

radical tradition as a historical fact, realizes voguings innovative practice of resistance and

survival under extremely dangerous circumstances, is what set the possibilities for transwarp.

Yet, this technology should not be seen as an evolution or progression of the tradition, but

instead, another way we send ourselves, and others, into freedom.

For now, this gene of the DNA of vogue is too complex to analyze. Just as geneticists

have not decoded the full human genome, so has this dance ethnographer not decoded all of

vogues secrets. This is a runway still needs to be walked.

8. My mother brought me up in the tender light of dawn.43

Legendary Overall Father Founder Antonio Lauren asked me to join the House of Lauren

in the summer of 2009.44 At the time I was on fellowship at Northwestern University to study

43 I am referencing Jomama Jones, who is a BlaQ drag queen. In her album, Six Way Home, she has a song called
Unknown. In it, she speak to having no trust in the other, not trust in herself, and calls for only trusting the
periodic unknown aspects of life, such as, the tenderness of dawn. No one knows what the dawn will look like, or
feel like, but one can trust in its eternal reiterations. This is also a reference to N. Scott Momadays book of poetry,
House Made of Dawn, which speaks to his learning of Indigenous Knowledge as his praxis for life. And, this is also
a forecasting to my interpretation of the Houses of the Ballroom Scene.
44 Field Notes: July 8th, 2009.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 23
voguing, and had already attended a few balls. I had gone onto walkformewednesdays.com, a

Ballroom Scene social media site (which no longer exists), and posted/asked for information

about vogue, Ballroom Scene history, and connections for interviews. Noticing that I had great

promise as a voguer, and a historian of the scene, Founder Lauren wanted me in his House.

Though I had not won any competitions yet, Founder expected me to be great in other ways. Of

course, I was still expected to walk.

Through him, I met then Overall Mother Chela Lauren Van Cartier, who was based in

Los Angles. Both of them being longstanding leaders of the House of Lauren, provided me more

than enough information about voguing and the Ballroom Scene for my summer research project.

But more importantly, they became my parents, my extended family away from my biological

and developmental-home family.

My mother, Amparo De Anda (nanazin), brought me up in San Jose and Santa Cruz

California. My father, Joe Perez (da-tah), whom she divorced when I was nine, was often in my

life in subtle waysbut was never a full caretaker. It was always my mother who took care of

me, managed my necessities, and imbued me with the philosophies, morality, and ethics which

exist at the core of my being. She raised me to become a sweet indigenous man, through an

indigenous feminist and (Black) Marxist orientation. She had no time or tolerance for patriarchy,

misogyny, racism or capitalism.

I was raised going to various indigenous ceremonies and sacred sites. I dance with and

for the earth, and I was taught about the purpose of life from many indigenous elders. Indigenous

Knowledge was the primary optic by which I viewed the world. This, made school difficult, as it

was hard for me to negotiate western European logic and reason with Indigenous Knowledge

they resist each other at all levels. But, this was not the case with the House of Lauren.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 24
 Founder Lauren made it clear to me that he wanted my indigeneity to be a part of the

House of Lauren. He wanted to make sure that this House, and the Ballroom Scene, did not

become ethnocentric to Black peoples. In his view, the Ballroom Scene had always been a

diverse community of QTPOCand that diversity was vital for the scenes survival.

I agreed with Founder, and I continue to be in the House as Overall Prince Dante Lauren.

This kind of diversity in kinship is traceable to the Black radical tradition. As noted by Cedric

Robinson in the Black Movements in America, the most effective forms of slave resistance []

were those organized in colonial Louisiana and resulted from collaborations between Native

Americans and Africans (18). Throughout the history of America, there have been

collaborations to resist the imperial forces of the United States of America, made up of

indigenous and Black peoples. The House of Lauren is a reiteration of this resistance, within the

marronage of the Ballroom Scene. My indigenous roots, and indigenous knowledge, are part of

voguing in ways I am still discovering. But the tools of western European academic practice are

insufficient to investigate this aspect of vogue.

What is required for my study of voguing is an indigenous feminist methodology. This

process of investigation, contemplation, and critical writing is something I had learned from my

mother, but is also described in the work of Gloria Anzalda.

In proposing the material construction of the praxis and ideology of El Mundo Zurdo,

Anzalda reiterates that exists an urgent need for revolutionizing our ways of working as artist

and scholars. More, there needs to be a space, perhaps a marronage, for those left outside of the

western European logic and processes, to gather and work. What she does, is identify that there

is already this space, emerging all the time, and calls it El Mundo Zurdobut more importantly,

she describes how this place operates as a method, a path to walk:

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 25
 EL Mundo Zurdo (the Left-handed World) The pull between what is and what

should be. I believe that by changing ourselves we can change the world, that

traveling El Mundo Zurdo path is the path of a two-way movementa going deep

into the self and an expanding out into the world, a simultaneous recreation of the

self and a reconstruction of society. And yet, I am confused as to how to

accomplish this.45

This two-way investigation is necessary for my study of vogue. Being a voguer, I cannot

look to the children of the Ballroom Scene, and see them as Others to myself. They are my

family, they are my kin. More, because voguing is an apparatus that I practice regularly, I cannot

ignore the changes it has had on me, or the changes I have had on the vogue technique. It is

necessary that my studies of voguing are a two-way movementa going deep into [myself] and

an expanding out into the world[:]a simultaneous recreation of [myself] and a reconstruction of

society.46

This essay is an attempt at this process and methodology. It is an example of what might

become a larger work and practice. As I weave my personal life in with the academic research I

have conducted, I hope I am walking the path of El Mundo Zurdo, and I hope it is an effective

way to approach my scholar duty of communicating my insights. Like most essays, this is a

rehearsal, for the larger forthcoming book project.

9. Conclusions are proposals for new beginnings: Walk for me!

In agreement with Jos Esteban Muoz, I have found voguing to be much more than a

frivolous celebration of Black queer life. The practice is deeply complex, and is reflective of

45 Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzalda, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color:
208.
46 Ibid.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 26
histories and values of queer and trans* people of color. It is an intimate dance, a mixing of

sexualities, genders, and all other intimate part of the body that come with dancing. Voguing and

the Ballroom Scene may be the enactment of El Mundo Zurdo that Anzalda was confused as to

how to make possible. Voguing and the Ballroom Scene may be the Black radical tradition that

will free us, and send us, into a world reconfigured, where imperialism and oppression has been

banished. This Quare way of existing may be the answer to the issues the world is suffering

from.

Such an idea, however, is dangerous. It can be easily over-simplified, and through a

banner of multiculturalism, invisibilize and erase the diversity voguing values. It can lead us into

escapism of imperialism rather than to active resistance to imperial domination. It is important to

never risk the work of dance culture to be the only answer to our needs.

It is here that my conclusion, has met with another, to propose a precarious walk for our

future; one that is necessary for our survival. Marcos Becquer and Jose Gatti critique the popular

understand of voguing, which erases and renders the struggles of QTPOC superfluous, which

were necessary to form voguing. Vogue, is a dance that suffering and struggle made possible

and is a necessary practice of resilience through suffering and struggle. For Becquer, Gatti, and

myself:

voguers can be seen to pose desire itself as a form of counter-hegemonic

knowledge. Understood as syncretic articulation, [or collective performative

accounts of ephemera], voguing explores the possible within the existing. By

embracing, critiquing and restructuring, eg, ethnicity, gayness, class, etc, it

intervenes in sovereign discursive structureslike the experimental and the

authenticwhich would reduce its elements to immanent moments of a

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 27
 naturalized system of difference and which [voguing] reads as inadequate to its

reconfigurations of the real. Interpreting the closure of identities and of their

relations, voguings syncretism pro-pose new possibilities of struggle. (81)

As voguers and their voguing, read and come to understand the world, their voguing, their

dancing, creates new worlds for existence. Through marronage or other iterations of the Black

radical tradition, voguing allows its dancers to use the catalytic properties of struggle to resist the

cultural domination of American imperialism. To vogue, then is to evoke a statement of the

struggle and survival, against oppression. It is an, not the, response to the call, the need, to have

freedom when there is none to be had.

I ask you to walk for me, which is, to bring forth our ability to struggle and survive

together. I ask you to walk with me, so that we never allow oppression to exorcise our resilience

and alternative ways of know the world. Walk for me, so that our ineffable realness is never

settled into the texts of those who seek to enslave our corporealities in tomes of what has been.

Walk for me, so that we are sent into freedom.

Cuauhtmoc Peranda 28
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