Performance as Intravention

Abstract

“What’s going on in the USA? George Bush got us in a disarray. We got soldiers in Baghdad; we should be fighting AIDS instead,” chanted Chicago ballroom commentator Neiman Marcus Escada.3 Usually spoken in front of a captive crowd of black queer members of the ballroom community during a ball, Escada’s words serve as an astute critique of both US imperialism in the name of “national security” and its unwillingness to take appropriately aggressive measures to curtail the spread of HIV/AIDS infection among black gender and sexual marginals locally and abroad. Consisting of black and Latina or Latino LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) people, ballroom culture is a minoritarian social sphere where performance, queer genders and sexualities, and kinship coalesce to create an alternative world. Thus within and through performance at balls, Neiman Marcus Escada contributes to the creation of a counterdiscourse of HIV/AIDS. This is but one example of the important role that performance plays within ballroom culture and how it is a part of a critical practice of survival in which many of the members of this community are engaged.