Express Yourself. Voguing as a Form of Sociocultural Protest

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,3, Saarland University, language: English, abstract: Created to express cultural and sexual identity of minorities within the gay community, Voguing also served as a tool to reveal and protest heteronormative patriarchy and homophobia, white privilege and thereby the closely linked ideologies of racism and classism. Notably, racism and classism also posed to be considerable factors in the exclusion of African-American and Latin-American homosexual individuals within the mainstream white gay community. Societal anxiety of the then emerging HIV/AIDS crisis and the conservative government under Ronald Reagan, posed to be what Mazzone and Peressini call a threat of 'potential and complete exclusion' of African-American and Latin-American citizens from the gay community, American society at large and often even their own families. The broad societal exclusion led to the blossoming of a subculture with its own rules and structures. The analyses of the Voguing roots aims at disclosing the intersections of oppression factors for gay Vogue dancers of colour and further strives to unveil Voguing as a form of subcultural protest against norms established by white patriarchy. Jennie Livingston's documentary on the 1980s gay ballroom scene in New York serves as a tool to emphasise the unique position of gay outcasts of colour and allows an inspection of the structure and meaning of the ballroom scene with its houses and their organisation as post-modern families. As it is a pivotal aspect of the scene and its power to question traditional family and moral values rooted in religion, leading to heterosexist suppression and condemnation of homosexuals and all gender non-conformists, the documentary and the organisation of the ballroom scene will be analysed. In this context, the first mainstream release of the artist Malcolm McLaren in the late 1980s presenting, and the role of Madonna in the promotion of Voguing in mainstream popular culture in the early 1990s will be discussed. It is argued that Madonna's work and collaboration with dancers from the Voguing underground scene had the vigour to be an instrument to bring gay issues into the centre of discussion.