Landscapes Of Leisure

In This Heaven Gives Me Migraines: The problems and promise of landscapes cultural theorist Stacy Warren observes, “What were once treated as separate, self-contained places within which once could escape from the rigours of daily life now are seen as not so much segregated cites but modes of representation that permeate virtually all landscapes and hence are inseparable from daily life” (1). In her essay, Warren highlights a uniquely Western phenomenon in which “the lines between leisure, entertainment, and commodity become blurred” (2). Indeed, Warren’s observation allows us to re-imagine the House Ballroom scene as more than a pastime. It is the “backcloth against which almost all” of the ballroom participants’ “everyday cultural geographies are lived” (Warren 2).  In my research, I am considering the House Ballroom scene as an artefact of “pop-culture” that needs to be taken seriously. (Warren 2) Warren would identify the House Ballroom Scene as a culture that “incorporates the notion of struggle to construct” itself as “a fluid entity always being created, contested, and recreated” (Warren 3). It is my intention through my Renegayze to create for the viewer a landscape that features this community, in order to contest the notion that this culture because of its connection to commodity is somehow only “mediated” through “mass culture” and some how always already a form of just leisure (Warren 2,3). It's an issue of necessity that folks who have experienced historical exclusion from all meaningful avenues to mainstream acceptance that they create and maintain their leisure. In this sense leisure becomes more than a pastime for entertainment it becomes the essence and meaning of life itself. To achieve this I seek to objectify the robust history of this culture practice so that the contemporary participants featured in my images are acknowledge as part of rich cultural historical tradition that begins in the 1920s and innovates through to today. It is of extreme importance that future generations of queer people of color understand the breadth of innovation that their community is a part of and I assert that the House Ballroom scene is at the nexus of these meaningful contributions to American culture. I will “situate the dynamics of” of House Ball room musical “practices within the confines –and resources- of a mass mediated world” that comprises the ballroom and the heterosexual white world of capital against which it must imagine itself (Warren 3). The interplay between the real, the imagined, and the performed is the mechanism through which one can comprehend the sonic output of House Ball Room musicians such as DJ Mike Q and Vaughn Allure.