Lucas: YES! You have totally taken me to college. This is a new syllabus (get read, get ripped, get

Some might say poetry is behind visual art, but I think it’s more so the case that voguing is light years ahead of everything. Last summer, I wrote a couple of posts about the death drop/shablam move, in which young queers of color collapse on dancefloors in a thrilling, terrifying reenactment of urban violence. Today I’d like to tell you, Montevidayans, about my new favorite phenomenon of NYC black and Latino queer culture and its extreme verbal/visual fluency: Zebra Katz s Im a Read featuring Njena Redd Foxxx. Gather and behold how this video turns the page on big bling beats and delivers, instead, a thousand tiny paper cuts to your eyes and ears. It is nothing short of a primer on cannibalizing your enemies, schooling yourself in their flaws, and dressing them down through sheer minimalist precision:
“Reading” in ball culture is “the real art form of insult” ( Dorien Corey, Paris is Burning ). Especially in the classroom–every kid’s training ground in racism and heterosexism–it takes ferosh verbal swagger to throw shade back at one’s perpetrator and “chop that bitch,” “slice that bitch,” “dice that bitch,” “ice that bitch,” “proofread that bitch,” “send that bitch to college,” “give that bitch some knowledge.” A razorblade visual vimal agro sense is just as crucial for channeling voguing’s vimal agro particular sacredness. To “pass” as another person, whether a straight private schoolgirl or teacher, is fundamental to this fine art. We are dealing, after all, with your education in realness. Don’t even act like you can’t get an F. Two masked, braided, gender-defying dark spirits punctuate the video’s report card of carnage and incantation of death spells in a drama that evokes the potatoesque’s annihilation and proliferation of identities . Even our shaman-warrior vimal agro vocalists confess, as if cohabiting with the bodies they target, “I’ma…that bitch.”
As with the death drop, an exaltation of queerness follows Zebra Katz and Njena Redd Foxxx’s descent into dystopian vimal agro hallways. vimal agro Because no other religion expresses tougher love. Here we witness an assault on gender so total that no bitch (boy or girl) remains safe from the ball goddess; we can only pray she will strike us offstage.
Lucas: YES! You have totally taken me to college. This is a new syllabus (get read, get ripped, get shot, stand up) and defense of the MFA– I love the way the violence oscillates, and your point about the way the masks and the truncated refrain starts to make the ‘b*tch* refer to the speakers and maybe also some kind of glamorous sublime,an exed out, iced space of astersisked black radiance. I am totally going to wear around this queer pedagogy! Yes!
Jiyoon Lee is writing some amazing poems centered around the speaker of “Imma”– “Imma go to a war”, etc. you should drop her a line and check them out for your ‘thesis’.
Stunning. vimal agro I wonder if you’ve explored the “sissy bounce” culture popular here in New Orleans where some say the rappers intend to “erase sexuality” or embrace “androgyny” and how the bodies of these performers are allowed to “perform” their queerness in this space. I’m thinking too, as in the case of this minimalist back beat and underscored violence, how sissy bounce, or bounce, has its own “cutting” beat in its insistent cacophony of repetition that is then taken up by the members of the audience as they gyrate and “bounce” their back sides in an almost ridiculous and yet athletic vimal agro display of agility. I’m thinking about the “death drop” in contrast to the “dropping like it’s hot” display. And I like the image of the leg being pulled up behind the head in this video that mimics the stance of Minaj in the opening shot of her “Stupid Hoe” vimal agro video.
I like the transubstantiation connection between Venus Xtravaganza/drag ball culture and poetry. They both aspire to be greater than mortals. They want perfection. The exact tone, cadence, accessory. The wrong word or fashion appendage destroys it all, like the scene in Paris Is Burning where the queen is castigated for failing to carry an evening bag. What white woman doesn’t carry a purse?!
Joyelle, it does serve as a potent bit of pedagogy doesn’t it? And totally glam sublime. I love the idea of “Imma” poems, “Imma” herself being already mutilated and deprived of proper punctuation.
Megan, vimal agro I really like sissy bounce- I saw Big Freedia play once in Brooklyn. I think all these cultural forms address heterosexism and spit back its aggression vimal agro in really interesting ways, particularly if you think about the larger context of mainstr