Moderator: Victoria Xaka, Cornell University
Andrés Amado, “Refashioning of La Catrina in Drag: A Queer Latine Vision for Día de los Muertos”This paper explores how drag shows, as exuberant performances of gender, can offer a queer vision of Latine/x identity in the interstitial space of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through music, dance, and fashion. While Latine/x queer communities in the Texas Rio Grande Valley had remained at the edge of both mainstream and queer cultures in the United States, they began to draw media attention with the increased politization of the border region brought about by Trumpism. For instance, in 2019, NPR covered a protest drag show at the border wall in Brownsville, Texas, that raised funds to support LGBTQ+ asylum seekers. In popular culture, the 2024 season of the reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race featured Geneva Karr, a contestant from Brownsville. In these instances, local drag artists put on display elements of their transnational identities as queer Texan-Mexicans through music and fashion. To further investigate the local refashioning of intersecting identities through drag, this presentation analyzes a performance I observed in the border city of McAllen, Texas on November 3, 2019, which celebrated the Mexican holiday día de los muertos. Studying the musical, choreographic, and costume design elements of the performance, I argue that this display of music and fashion offers a queer utopian vision as described by José Esteban Muñoz: a world not quite existing as a present reality, but a reconfiguration of elements from the past that project a queer aesthetic possibility. This vision came to life through juxtapositions of binary elements commonly associated with Mexican and queer cultures—sometimes in tension with each other. By refashioning La Catrina, the skeleton-like demure lady symbolizing the Mexican holiday for the dead as a sexualized burlesque character, the performance offered a queer vision of local traditions at the edges of borders and identities.
Chaz Antoine Barracks, “Durag Matter: Everyday Aesthetics and Black Queer Spectacle”The Black queer-femme body as a site of rebellion within the homeplace (bell hooks, 1990). I got my first durag from my favorite cousin’s boyfriend. While babysitting me, he gave me a fresh line-up and a wave-brushed my curls down into an active ocean breeze. He then stood behind me, tying on the durag with a joyous sense of Black pride that bonded us. Since the making of my 2020 film
Everyday Black Matter, I have been in critical dialogue with artist-scholars whose work contextualizes Black popular and material culture(s) from the everyday as archival sites of queer worldmaking. Becoming a popular trend in the late 90’s into 2000’s, durags have evolved as a marker of innovative style owned by the Black community— who is solely responsible for transforming this protective style item into iconic and industry-disruptive style (hiphopcloset.com). Fashion designer Kadeem Fyffe recently inserted durags into his most recent NYFW show “Wedding and a Funeral” at the Park Ave Cathedral stating, “playing off the typical high-fashion show practice of including a bridal piece as the closing look, I featured a white lace durag on the “groom” to offer contrast to his black structural look. I saw it as a critique of rigid gender roles in fashion through (re)placement of the “veil.” It was a look!!”
This innovation through durag fashion-art that I mark as rebellious Black queer representation, is what I plan to explore in this lo-fi critical kiki about mundane Black matter. It features rich auto-theory and mixed-media methods (sound/oral history, short film, fashion photography) to center durag fashion as sites of rebellion that ferments Black politics of pleasure and joy in industry/institutional critique. I’m also displaying my own 8-ft long durags as research material to help blur the lines between resistance and refusal in Black archives that disregard rigid respectability in order to complicate the straight/queer binary.
Black artist have been engaging durags style as disruptive style for quite some time now and I want to enter the chat, at PopCon 2025 to explore the fugitive possibilities of Black everyday style. This is a work-in-progress exhibition in the making that builds onto my recent durag exhibit works, presented at Honcho Campout (2022), Studio 23 (Richmond, Va), and the Iridian Gallery (Richmond, 2022).
Sofi Chavez, “‘She’s So Solid,’ ‘She’s So Soft’: Butch-Femme Style in MUNA’s Lesbian Erotic Gaze”LA-based indie pop band MUNA builds a lyric lesbian erotic world grounded in felt materials. In their 2022 self-titled album, the band lingers in the aesthetics of lesbian life: how it feels to see a girl’s silk dress “dancing in the wind,” or to be with a girl “of material substance” who is “so solid” (“She’s using her hands, she’s pulling the levers”). This essay explores the ways in which MUNA’s attention to style reveals a lesbian erotic gaze. I first take up their chart-topping hit “Silk Chiffon” (MUNA ft. Phoebe Bridgers) to elucidate femme style and desire, and then turn to the more subtle elaborations of butch desirability in their less commercially popular track “Solid.” Through close-readings of the lyrics, music video, and the band’s self-produced merchandise, I attend to the ways in which lesbian identity emerges from encounters with the material world; beauty for MUNA and their listeners emerges not from normative or conventional femininity, but is found in the ways that women manipulate the world around them. The essay also considers the endurance and transformation of contentious categories of “butch” and “femme,” turning to popular music’s resignification of these historic, situated social identities.
Ryan Lambe, “A Battle Cry for Queer Worlds: Voice, Music, and Sound in Live-Action Roleplay”In August 2022, a transgender woman in red armor and top hat shouts, calling for archers—including myself—to volley our foam-tipped arrows at people in imp costumes while she whacks her foam sword against a large round PVC shield. In an interview, she tells me that playing this game gave her the confidence to speak up and ask for a raise at work, where many transgender women face discrimination. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in two fantasy live-action roleplaying games (LARPs) in California and Florida to examine how LGBTQ players use music, sound, and vocality for queer world-making. Unlike digital roleplaying games (RPGs), LARPers fully embody their characters, using voices, playing music, swinging swords, shooting arrows, and dressing in medievalist garb. LARPers craft “kits”—costumes that, with vocalism, accent, and music, perform their character. I situate LGBTQ LARP performance using ludomusicology and transvocality. Queer games scholars document how transgender players in massively multiplayer online RPGs try out gendered identification and performance before risking their bodies in reality. Similarly, ludomusicologist William Cheng amplifies how queer and trans gamers in online games risk discrimination when speaking. Where these scholars attend to digital games, I argue that queer and trans LARPers in analog games use music and voice to refigure social spaces. However, LGBTQ LARPers also play against a trend in LARP celebrating violent, militant masculinity. This paper builds on ethnomusicologist Luis Garcia-Misprieta’s insights about surface positive affect in creating queer worlds by locating LARP as engaged queer solidarity amidst escapist gaming. The sonic queer world-making of LGBTQ LARPers becomes more urgent for queer and trans survival in the context of legislation targeting queer and trans spaces for elimination.
