Episode 2 | “Butch Queens Up in Pumps” – Marlon Bailey on Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture

Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined in the studio by professor, Marlon Bailey

Author of Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2013), which Dwight McBride describes as, “At once revelatory and heartbreaking, Bailey’s ethnographic details leap off the page, putting the reader dead center inside the kaleidoscopic world that is ballroom. Beyond his wonderful storytelling, however, Bailey’s research is undergirded by the very ‘ethics of care’ practiced by the members of the ball houses he studies, as well as a nuanced theorizing that sacrifices none of the material implications of the political economy of racialized spaces—specifically the ballroom scene in Detroit.” Bailey is an Associate Professor of women and gender studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. In Butch Queens Up in Pumps he examines Ballroom culture where inner-city LGBT people dress, dance, and vogue to compete for various prizes. Bailey’s first-person performance ethnography of the Ballroom scene in Detroit foregrounds Ballroom as a queer cultural formation that revises previous discourses on gender, sexuality, community, and kinship.