Butch queens up in pumps: Gender, performance and ballroom culture in Detroit by Marlon M. Bailey
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B u t c h qu e e n s up i n pu m p s : Ge n d e r , p e r f o r m a n c e a n d b a l l r o o m c u l t u r e i n De t r o i t Marlon M. Bailey University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 2013, 279pp., $85.00, ISBN: 978-0472071968 (hardcover)
Latino Studies (2015) 13, 301–303. doi:10.1057/lst.2015.6
Marlon M. Bailey’s Butch Queens Up in Pumps is a stunning ethnography of Detroit’s Black and Latina/o Ballroom culture. Its interlocutors are vibrant and resilient people who navigate homophobia, transphobia, racism and HIV/AIDS through the creation of queer kin structures and life-affirming performances. They compete in Balls: competitions that include elements like voguing, walking the runway and presenting the best looks in categories like Thug Realness and Butch Queen Sex Siren. Interviews with members of the Ballroom community and Bailey’s stories of competing in Balls for the Legendary House of Prestige portray how Detroit’s Ballroom community constructs Black queer spaces to resist the racism of White LGBT culture and the homophobia of local Black communities. Butch Queens is engaging and compelling; it opens up new avenues for discussing the importance of performance for LGBT people of color, and the multifaceted ways they creatively resist discrimination. Butch Queens explores themes including: the generative role of Balls and Houses in creating unique gender and sexual identities through emotional and performative labor; an intersectional analysis of how Ballroom practices are influenced by race, class, sexuality and gender; and the continued importance of finding
internal intraventions to combat HIV/AIDS in the Ballroom community that do not recreate transphobia, misogyny and homophobia in institutional advocacy systems. Chapter 1 introduces the history of US Ballroom culture, the author’s personal stake in the Detroit scene, and the book’s analytic frameworks and methods. Chapter 2 explains the complex and fluid gender system of Ballroom culture and how it simultaneously reinscribes dominant definitions of sex, gender and sexuality while providing greater flexibility for self-expression than do heteronormative identities. Chapters 3 and 4 explore Ballroom’s houses, kin structure, performance labor, Balls, competitive categories and the physical spaces of Houses and Balls that shape Ballroom culture. In chapter 5, Bailey provides a scathing critique of HIV/AIDS prevention agencies and community-based organizations that claim to serve Ballroom communities without ever including them. The chapter also looks at internal community responses to HIV/AIDS, which use balls and performance to educate community members about risk reduction. Butch Queens closes with an epilogue reflecting on the spread of ballroom culture worldwide and in younger Black and Latina/o communities.
© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/
Vol. 13, 2, 301–303
Book Review
Methodologically, Bailey draws primarily upon ethnography and auto-ethnography to provide in-depth case studies of the live
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