Alternative Gender Realities: The Impact of Race on AAPI Ballroom Performances

• In Event: 41021 - Student Forum Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 2: Critical Gender Studies

Abstract

This undergraduate thesis studies the gender performances and “gender system” of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) ballroom communities and drag troupes in San Francisco and Oakland and their adaptations of a predominantly Black and Latine cultural framework and history. Ballroom culture, which originated in Harlem, New York around the 1960s, developed a gender system and gender performance categories heavily informed by race and class, which have since spread to ballroom communities across the United States. Ballroom performances can be a site of self-actualization, liberation, and reclamation of gender from hegemonic culture (Bailey 2013). However, they can also be sites in which whiteness and hegemonic genders are reproduced (Hooks 1992).
In the last two decades, AAPI ballroom and drag communities in San Francisco and Oakland have emerged, yet little research has focused specifically on Asian American performers and their cultural interactions. The context of their formation differs significantly due to the distinct historical, cultural, and socio-economic landscape of the Asian diaspora in the San Francisco Bay Area in ways that both align with and diverge from the historical precedents set by Black ballroom culture. Hence, my primary research question is: How do contemporary AAPI drag and ballroom participants in the Bay Area negotiate their racial and cultural identities and gendered racial stereotypes within the predominantly Black and Latine drag and ballroom scene? Supplementing literature on ballroom history, this research is guided by Marlon Bailey’s theory of performance labor, José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications theory, Butler’s gender performativity, and Trans of Color Critique. Through ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with AAPI ballroom and drag performers, I aim to uncover the complexities of cultural borrowing, learning, adapting, and appropriation in constructing new gendered realities, identities, and performances that fit their racial and cultural identities.

Author

• Lark Chang-Yeh, University of California-Berkeley