Vogue’ology
We invite you to participate in Vogue’ology, an investigation of the terms of community organizing for the House/Ballroom community.
The Vogue’ology project grows out of our friendships and collaborations with you on many initiatives, all of which are rooted in love for the House/Ballroom community and concern for its well-being. Among the initiatives that have inspired Vogue’ology are:
1. the formation of the federation of houses
2. the formation of the House/Ballroom ministry
3. Vogue-evolution
4. an archiving of the community’s history
5. the development of the Kiki ball movement
6. the development of Vogue Theory
7. House/Ballroom specific HIV/AIDS prevention projects
The formation of the Vogue’ology project was prompted by Robert’s receipt of a fellowship from the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan.
The New School was established almost 100 years ago as an alternative to the elite institutions of Columbia and NYU. The founders were particularly concerned to enable working class adults in New York to continue their education by keeping costs very low. The New School was also an important location for progressive political movements and art experimentation. While it has lost some of its populist character, the democratic spirit of learning lives on and is there for us to draw from.
Vogue-ology is an opportunity for us to gather for a series of conversations aimed at clarifying and defining the terms, principles and themes that underlie the projects we are undertaking with and for the House/Ballroom community.
The primary question is: how best to organize the House/Ballroom community as a political constituency?
The House/Ballroom community is rich in power and resources and ought to be in a position to determine its destiny in all areas. Despite heavy burdens, the community should never be positioned as victims dependent on outsiders. We will reflect on the many ways in which this autonomy is being asserted as well as on the ways in which it is being undermined.
We propose meeting together a few times over the coming months with the aim of taking advantage of two opportunities at the New School:
1. The first is an invitation to meet in early May with a group of professors and students who are developing a critical gender studies program at the New School and to share the House/Ballroom community’s understandings of gender as well as its agenda for eliminating gender oppression and discrimination.
2. The second is to mount an exhibition in one of the galleries at Parsons School of Art and Design (one of the schools that make up the New School) concerned with the House/Ballroom Scene. We can convene a number of public programs in this venue, such as a report to the community on the work we have done in order to broaden the discussion of community organizing.
The Vera List Center is providing funding for refreshments for each meeting, funds to cover travel expenses and a modest honorarium for each participant. One or two anthropology students at the New School may be available to take notes at the meetings and to undertake research on our behalf.
Ultra-red
SCHOOL OF ECHOES
The New School Sessions - Vogue’ology
Vogue’ology, noun. 1. the study of vogueing; 2. the knowledge produced by vogueing
For a number of years, I and the eight other members of the sound-art collective, Ultra-red, have used our art practice to learn from and support communities engaged in political organizing. Our work is guided by our investments in:
1. ending the AIDS crisis;
2. fighting homophobia and transphobia, and advancing the sexual rights of women and others;
3. confronting the conditions of the war on the poor initiated by welfare reform, the unchecked growth in the prison industrial complex, and the disempowering of workers through systems of global capitalism;
4. struggles for affordable housing;
5. resisting the increasing militarization of border controls and asserting the rights of migrants and immigrants; and
6. developing venues for radical learning while actively monitoring mainstream education systems, which are almost always mechanism for perpetuating racial and class prejudices and privilege and producing docile workers.
Ultra-red’s working method is based on a very simple proposition: organizing is most effective when it arises from careful, systematic listening to the conditions of experience.
Thus, rather than having a collective follow a predetermined political analysis or scripts (a top-down approach to organizing), the collective comes together to listen carefully to each other and their broader context (a non-hierarchical approach most often used by religious communities such as the Quakers).
The collective organizes what it hears to produce a collective analysis that guides political action.
Like my colleagues, I am both a student of methods of organizing and an organizer myself. My political investments include all of those listed above, particularly as they relate to class, race and gender oppression.
My greatest learning about organizing and struggle has come from my engagement with the House/Ballroom community. The critical vibrancy and explosive power of this collective is a constant sort of inspiration. I am ever mindful, however, of the harsh struggle and hard love in which the children have been engaged for generations.
Following years of teaching and working as an artist in various parts of the United States, Europe and my birth country of South Africa, I was recently able to return home to New York at the invitation of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School.
I have a very modest fellowship for the year and the support of the Vera List Center to convene a group concerned with issues of community organizing.
When I received the invitation, I immediately decided to make myself and the resources of the fellowship available to my teachers (all of you) in the House/Ballroom community to contribute to the community’s ongoing struggle.
With Michael Roberson and Edgar Riviera-Colon as co-organizers of this process, I have had conversations with almost all of you over the past few months about what we might do together. I entered these conversations with a thought that we might together systematically organize the critical power of Vogue.
Vogue is not simply a dance style or performance structure. It is a critical vocabulary of power. It produces power and it also subjects the terms of power to play and critique. Vogue is about freedom and is also, consequently, about the control of freedom.
It is a way of generating knowledge through the body, hence the appropriateness of the term: Vogue’ology – the form of knowledge that is vogue. It is on par with other systems of knowledge with which I am familiar from years as a student, researcher and teacher in universities around the world. How can the power of vogue guide the political organizing of the House/Ballroom community?
By suggesting we bring Vogue’ology into the university, I do not mean that it simply be incorporated as another form of knowledge. I firmly believe that Vogue’ology can also challenge the university’s participation in systems of exclusion and prejudice.
The conversations leading up to this invitation have expanded the projects in which it is rooted and to which is may contribute. So rather than thinking only of studying vogue or registering the knowledge it produces, I am aware of initiatives:
1. to organize a service and advocacy resource for the community;
2. to document and archive the history of the House/Ballroom movement;
3. to give greater voice to the younger members of the community;
4. to organize a ministry that is particular to the members of the community;
5. to codify the theory of Vogue;
6. to develop prevention programs specifically for members of the community; and,
7. to be enterprising with the wealth of performance and creative talent and skill in the community in a manner that resists appropriation and exploitation.
Vogue’ology does not add yet another initiative to this list. Rather it is an opportunity to contemplate the terms and investments that are common to these projects so that they can be in conversation with each other. It is also an opportunity to initiate robust conversations with people outside the scene but with whom we have common cause.
One area of common struggle is gender discrimination and oppression. The harsh battles with gender activist groups and the exclusions of people of color and trans-people have enforced separations that have isolated and undermined the struggle against patriarchy.
Anne Snitow, a professor at the New School with a long history of political struggle in many causes, is actively working to establish a gender studies program. She is an ally and we have much to learn from her and to teach her and her colleagues.
I am working with Ann and the Gender Studies organizing committee and have suggested that they meet with the Vogue’ology team to share their investments, ideas and political agendas with us and we share our reflections with them. We can see how the notion of Gender Studies can be used to expand thinking and activism regarding the rights of trans-people, people engaged in commercial sex work, and the disempowering of people-of-color.
A central question for me is: how are members of the House/Ballroom community and members of other gender and sexual rights movements working for the power, rights and well-being of trans-sex-workers-of-color in New York City?
A second area for conversation is in the art gallery. Parsons School of Art and Design is a part of the New School and I have been asked to organize an exhibition in one of the galleries Fall 2010.
If the Vogue’ology group wants this space, we can have it. We can use the space to assemble an exhibition of the critical history of the House/Ballroom movement and we can use to the space to meet with members of the community to hear their reflections on this history and how the past open the present to a more liberated future. It is also a venue in which we can confront the culture industry and the exclusionary practices of the art work.
The gallery I have been offered has an enormous window looking out on 5th Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets so we can also address the street.
