Suburban vogue and other queer survival strategies

Abstract

ABSTRACT Vogue conjures many things: honed Black and Brown queer and trans bodies, queer space, and communal resistance to hostile worlds. It is rarely something associated with the suburbs, US or elsewhere. This article investigates how the international expansion of vogue leads to the raced and geographic specificity of suburban Sydney. It does this through an analysis of Slay Your Oppressor(s) (2016), a hybridized vogue-martial arts performance by Bhenji Ra, Kilia Tipa, and Davina Chor held in an outer-suburban shopping strip. My account of Slay and the queer cultural histories and formations it brings to the fore is framed by the racialization of Sydney’s suburbs that condition the dominant urban narrative of escape from suburban exclusion. I argue that Slay mines the realities of violence against non-normative Brown bodies while complicating notions of inclusion. The instrumentalization of vogue as a form of self-defence highlights the multiple dimensions of queer survival strategies, many of which are lost in the longstanding theoretical standoff between accounts of suburban normativity and urban antinormativity. Relays between international queer capitals such as New York, iconic dance and cultural forms such as vogue, and maligned spaces thought to be devoid of queerness such as suburban Sydney resolve through local understandings of queerness and race. This article argues that suburban vogue displaces certainties around gender, sexuality, family, resistance, and the models of inclusion/exclusion they traffic in.