Wild Women with the Need for Speed

“Of course, Del Rey has no truck with coherence. For her, no archive is more revealing than any other. Vintage is the only vantage point. Authenticity is just one shade on a palette. The video-bites of history offer themselves up, sluttishly, to her heavily lined Instagram-eyes. Her take on Kennedy is the logical continuance of a cultural phenomenon in which visibility was privileged above all else. There is no conspiracy, no aching for authenticity, no desire for connection with the real. Video nostalgia means the watcher is (always and never) home.”

Vogueing is too often considered a simplistic celebration of black queer culture. It is seen as a simple appropriation of high fashion or other aspects of commodity culture. I am proposing that we might see something other than a celebration in these moves—the strong trace of black and queer racialized survival, the way in which children need to imagine becoming Other in the face of conspiring cultural logics of white supremacy and heteronormativity. The gesture contains an articulate message for all to read, in this case a message of fabulousness and fantastical becoming. It also contains another message, one less articulated and more ephemeral but equally relevant to any understanding of queer gestures, gestures that, as I have argued, are often double-or multivalenced. So while the short-sighted viewer of Aviance’s vogueing might see only the approximation of high-fashion glamour as he moves and gestures on the stage, others see/ hear another tune, one of racialized self-enactment in the face of overarching opposition.

Catholic art critic in the 1800s: hmm im liking the overtones of guilt & sacrifice but i think its missing a lil smth…