Learn Your Place, Earn Your Spot: Consecration, Status, and Legitimacy in the Atlanta Kiki Ballroom Scene

• In Event: Ethnographic Approaches to Social Psychology

Abstract

Consecration is the public act of awarding exceptional worth—separating the extraordinary from the merely good. While scholars have shown how consecration stabilizes hierarchies in established fields, we know far less about how it operates at moments of emergence, when distinctions are fragile and legitimacy remains unsettled. This paper examines consecration in the Atlanta Kiki Ballroom Scene, a localized cultural world organized around competitive events known as Balls. At these events, participants compete in categories such as voguing, runway, and glamour-based performance, and may be publicly elevated—or “deemed”—to ranks including Star, Statement, Legend, and Icon. These ranks structure authority, recognition, and belonging.

Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025—including participant observation, archival materials, and oral histories—I trace how acts of consecration generated both status hierarchy and controversy. In its early years, the scene operated informally; reputations circulated, but rank distinctions lacked formal structure. Early deemings exposed the fragility of hierarchy, prompting disputes over criteria, authority, and favoritism. These conflicts were not merely interpersonal—they were struggles over legitimacy itself.

I conceptualize consecration as a mechanism of status amplification and legitimacy production. If status hierarchies reflect shared evaluations of worth, consecration intensifies and formalizes those evaluations through ritualized public recognition. Repeated controversy led participants to introduce clearer guidelines and procedures, shifting disputes from personalities to process. Over time, proceduralization and retrospective narration—through oral histories and commemorations—reframed once-contested deemings as foundational milestones.

Consecration thus operates recursively: high-status actors disproportionately shape whose elevation gains traction, while endorsement further entrenches hierarchy. By observing these dynamics longitudinally, this study demonstrates how legitimacy is co-produced through interaction, reform, and narrative work. Greatness in the Atlanta Kiki Scene is publicly awarded, collectively contested, and gradually naturalized.

Author

• Caleb M. Strickland, Emory University