A Note from the Editors: Queer Pedagogy in Theatre and Performance

Pedagogy Is a Ball

School and the ball are not the same Junior Labeija seems to suggest as he calls the categories, "Going to school. School. Elementary, high school, college. Not here. School." Jennie Livingston's 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning stages the 1980s Harlem's Black and Latinx ball scene, where queer and trans folks organized into houses compete for titles and trophies in a variety of categories. "Looking like a girl going to school. Do she look like a girl going to school?" Even if school isn't here, minoritarian subjects can perform school, can look like a girl going to school. As if summoning Michel de Certeau's argument that place is practiced space, Labeija tells us that a school happens when we perform it, not where it is.¹ Paris Is Burning is an overdetermined object of our disciplines (theatre, dance, performance), appearing on even the straightest and whitest syllabi insert shady snake rattle. It is a theoretically sound teaching text, one filled with critical ideas framed not just by the editing and direction of its white lesbian filmmaker, but staged in the exceptional ideations of power, performance, race, gender, and class that the ball children serve. Shortly after Labeija, Dorian Corey theorizes the systemic violence that denies minoritarian subjects educational opportunities, the need to perform learning when school is not available: "In real life, you can't get a job as an executive unless you have the educational background and the opportunity. … Black people have a hard time getting anywhere. And those that do are usually straight. In a ballroom, you can be anything you want." Labeija and Corey, in their wit and play, undo the separation between school and ball, pedagogy and performance, even as they summon it: "Not here. School."

The FX TV show "Pose" heavily draws on the architecture, characters, clothing, and language of Paris Is Burning to tell its own version of the ball scene in the eighties and early nineties. New house mother Blanca takes under her wing Damon, who has been kicked out of his natal home. Seeing Damon's potential as a dancer, Blanca enrolls him in a dance academy. At first blush, the academy is the respectable site of pedagogy, and the entire House of Evangelista is responsible for supporting Damon's education. And yet, as the show unfolds, pedagogy seems to be happening everywhere in the lives of these queer and trans of colors characters. "Pose" insists on the value of kinship and pedagogy amidst the AIDS crisis and rampantly transphobic city: in flashbacks we see the lessons Elektra offers Blanca when she takes her into the House of Abundance; Blanca, who is HIV positive, sits Damon down to walk him (and us) through safer sex practices and condom use; and the ball's emcee Pray Tell takes Damon and his boyfriend Ricky to get tested, a moment in which pedagogy is a doing rather than a saying. The show offers viewers lessons in queer history as well, opening its second season with recreations of ACT UP's die-ins, and a dramatization of Hart Island where people who died of HIV-related illness and whose bodies were not claimed were mass-buried. Denison professor Hollis Griffin invokes the disposability of queer bodies at Hart Island when trying to make sense of the destruction of artwork by queer, Cuban, HIV-positive artist Félix González-Torres on his campus.² Drawing on the memory of Hart Island, Griffin asks us to think about whose lives, bodies, and labor are disposable at the university.

The campus and the ball don't just come into proximity through representation. The University of Chicago, notorious for moating its ivory tower to distance itself from the working-class Black neighborhoods it sits among, hosts the annual Paragon Ball, a collaboration between the University's Center for HIV Elimination and the House of Balenciaga. Ball culture has found support and funding in HIV prevention projects, an innovative opportunity to reach young queer and trans people of color;³ the annual Paragon Balls...