Eat up, Mummy made you some discourse
I came across the term “noguing” and I wanted to share some thoughts about queer theory and camp culture.
To begin, it must be acknowledged that voguing and ballroom were created by black and brown drag queens and trans people and so any mockery of this art form is not only homophobic but is highly racialised and violent toward those communities.
Many people (particularly straight, cis people) view voguing/ballroom through modern aesthetics and therefore do not see it as it is - a rejection of mainstream beauty standards, hegemony and restraint - we see this in the fact that voguing is literally about throwing yourself into extreme shapes and flinging of respectability for the sake of evoking emotions in the viewer. In order to learn to vogue, you have to be willing to look silly and fail because thats the only way to become better.
Similarly, campness as a counterculture involve rejecting modern ideas of minimalism (which is white supremacy repackaged as aesthetics) and the need to look put together or appeal to a straight audience. In order to do this we must constantly examine our own loyalty to beauty as something to strive for and be willing to be rejected by the culture we have been conditioned to appeal to.
I therefore posit that the reason that noguing is shit (aside from it looking bad) is that it is very clear watching it that these people are still holding on to the idea that to fully commit to a death drop is cringe because they might make a fool of themselves.
Cringe culture is literally white supremacy because it restricts those who engage in mocking others into having such tight control over their creative expression lest they actually do something sincere that doesn’t fit into the tightly regimented category of “cool”
