![]() The ballroom offers them a possibility of expressing their own subjectivities in terms of ethnicity, sex, gender and sexuality and, at the same time, prepares them for resisting the physical and psychological attacks they persistently suffer from heteronormativity. lives in and then offers an insight of the way houses and balls operate as strategies of survival and resistance for gays and trans women who have gone through experiences of discrimination and stigmatisation in society at large and in their own ethnic communities. ![]() It starts with an analysis of the situational vulnerability and the precariousness an important part of the Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ populational segment in the U.S. This chapter discusses the way ballroom culture is represented in the first season of the series paying especial attention to its two main constituent parts as sites of not only protection and shelter, but also self-assertion and empowerment for a variety of vulnerable subaltern identities who have been deprived of a livable life in both homo and heteronormative communities. 1 Apart from the cast, the community is also present in the board both of scriptwriters (Janet Mock and Our Lady J) and directors (Janet Mock in “Love is the Message”). ![]() Created by the prolific team of producers Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuck, together with Stephen Canals, “t is the first American series where much of the core cast is not only transgender, but played by trans actors” (Seitz 2018, n.p.), making visible an up-to-now silenced community that is given a voice not only in the story but, more importantly, in the telling of that story. In this new adventure, she is accompanied by Angel, Lil Papi, Damon and Ricky, all of whom will live as her children, and by Pray Tell, master of ceremonies in the competitions and Blanca’s close friend, who persistently offers support and advice in all her decisions.įirst aired on FX 3 June 2018, Pose became almost immediately a worldwide phenomenon thanks to its presence in streaming services such as HBO and Netflix. The series focalises the two main elements of the 1980s ballroom culture-houses and ball competitions-through the House of Abundance, dictatorially led by Mother Elektra, and the House of Evangelista, led by Blanca, one of Elektra’s children who, tired of continuously being despised and humiliated by her haughty mother and after being diagnosed as HIV-positive, decides to leave and create her own family as a way to find a purpose in life mothering others in love and care, something neither Elektra nor her biological mother was able to offer her. This text, which opens the pilot episode of Pose, leads the spectator to a fictional world populated by LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx characters who are part of the ballroom community and look for success and praise competing in the ball scene. In doing so, the trans* subject reflects the contradictions inherent to any embodiment of a model figure, a failed attempt which the author, following (Halberstam.The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2011), reads as a generative nothingness which explodes in a volatile multiplicity that nullifies “normality”. In this chapter, the author analyses trans*-ness as an interstitial move that problematises any simplistic reading of essentialisation and naturalisation and explores the trans* condition as resisting more than reproducing heteronormative dichotomies of gender, sex and sexuality in a continuous process of what (Sullivan.Stryker and Whittle (eds), The Transgender Studies Reader, Routledge, New York, 2006) has called “(un)becoming other(s)”. The TV series Pose explores ballroom culture in 1980s New York bringing to the fore a variety of vulnerable subaltern identities who go through a process of total rejection and nullification in both homo and heteronormative communities due to their ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality, finding a site for self-assertion and empowerment in the micro-world constituted by houses and balls.
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