Srinidhi
Ramakrishna
Professor
Lingel
COMM
123
9
October 2019
Drag Ball Slang in the Mainstream
The revitalization of underground
drag ball culture in the 1970s and 1980s provided queer communities of color a
space to safely play with norms of gender and sexuality without fear. In an era
when the AIDS crisis was ravaging LGBT populations and discrimination against
the queer and mainly young Black and Latinx ball participants was embedded into
US society, the ball scene was – and continues to be – rooted in resistance.
The highly ritualized subculture has its own intricate structure. Grinnell
College’s “Underground Ball Culture” (n.d.) describes how in balls, competitors
‘walk’ against one another in categories to win prizes, doing things like
dancing, strutting, or spoken word. Categories often play with exaggeration and
reality. From a common category, “Realness” (how well can competitors blend in
with cisgender men or women?), to “Butch Queen Up In Pumps” (gay men imitating
a catwalk in heels), to voguing (voguing, according to Vox (2017, 0:25), being
a style of dance which imitates a series of models’ poses in a photoshoot),
ball culture was more than a competition to participants (“Underground Ball
Culture,” n.d.). With jargon and cultural practices, it represented an
all-encompassing counterculture. The language and slang terms used – and still
used – in the ball setting is an especially important cultural artifact of its
own. Today, while aspects of ball culture have been normalized, its jargon is
by far the most prevalent mainstream – in fact, the language of underground
queer ball participants of color in the late 1900s is practically vernacular
for the younger half of American society today.
Examples of such jargon are often
recognizable to most modern readers. The term “shade” – as in “throwing shade”,
or subtly dismissing someone – was first highlighted in landmark 1991 ballroom
culture documentary Paris Is Burning
(Brammer, 2018). A New York drag queen was shown explaining to her house,
Brammer (2018) continues, saying, “Shade is: I don’t tell you you’re ugly...Because you know you’re ugly”. “Yas”
(with the word drawn out to match one’s level of excitement, as in “yasss,
queen!”) originated when one saw an impressive ball performance (Villa, 2019).
The list goes on: “beating your face” to mean flawless makeup, “hunty” as an
endearing term, “tea” and all its assorted phrases, “realness”, “giving me
life”, “serve”, “slay” – all began in the context of drag and ball culture
(“Glossary of Drag Terms, n.d.). “Notes on ‘Camp’” by Susan Sontag (1964)
provides various definitions of what “camp” means, from “[Camp] is the love of
the exaggerated...of things-being-what-they-are-not” to “Camp is the triumph of
the epicene style. (The convertibility of ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ ‘person’ and
‘thing.’)” Drag ball slang is effortlessly campy, in all its emotional subtlety
and extravagance, as well as its smooth play with gender.
Over time, ball slang was coaxed
from the underground and gained more widespread attention, from queer and
mainstream society. In 1991, Paris Is
Burning showcased NYC’s thriving ball culture to a larger audience;
Madonna’s song “Vogue” popularized voguing around the same time (Pandell,
2018). As Pandell (2018) traces history, with RuPaul Charles’ 1992 music debut
solidifying him as the world’s most famous drag queen and, in 2009, his hit show
RuPaul’s Drag Race, drag and ball
culture – and all its vocabulary – was thrust into the forefront of pop
culture. Thus, media by both queer and straight people, from TV to film alike,
placed initially unfamiliar words into the mouths of millions who were
influenced by such media.
Since then, the language of QPOC
ball competitors are largely associated with populations very different from
its original. The various Urban Dictionary definitions of “Yas” and “Yassss” mark the words as the realm of
young, cis, white women (“Yas”, 2016; “Yassss”, 2016). Research confirms that
young women often popularize linguistic trends, according to Quenqua (2012),
and with drag slang’s endless options for emotional expression, its modern
stereotypical users are unsurprising. With its snappy, vivid tendencies, the
jargon is also often found in Internet culture (Pandell, 2018). But it hasn’t
entirely escaped the queer community – people also highly associate such slang
with gay men, specifically white gay men (D’Addario, 2014). The shift of drag
ball slang into the mainstream has caused varying levels of controversy;
accusations of cultural appropriation have multiplied against the many white
and/or straight Americans who seemingly use such jargon unaware of its
marginalized originators (Street, 2018).
As Sontag (1964) defines the term,
ball culture’s jargon is considered campy. In the eyes of Walter Benjamin in
Benjamin (1936), this sense of campy extravagance – but specific to its use
within a marginalized subculture frequently silenced by the mainstream – would
be considered the jargon’s “aura” or “authenticity”. As Benjamin (1936) writes,
“The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from
its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the
history which it has experienced” (p. 51). In this slang becoming the lingua
franca of the mainstream through media reproduction, its “aura” is diminished.
“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element:
its presence in time and space,” Benjamin (1936, p. 50) also states. Now the
language of drag balls is commonplace, it is no longer rooted in the resistance
unique to its hidden, subversive nature in the 1970s and 1980s. His analyses
explain much of the aforementioned cultural appropriation controversies,
bringing up the validity of using language created by different populations
outside of its original setting.
The jargon of participants in the
1970s and 1980s drag ball subculture, through media’s democratizing effects,
thoroughly infiltrated the mainstream. Controversy has often erupted over the
modern-day use of such language, initially used as a way for marginalized queer
Black and Latinx populations to navigate their contexts, by other privileged
populations. In all, this linguistic transformation is an important case study
of a common phenomenon where niche cultural artifacts are co-opted by
mainstream popular culture.
Works Cited
Benjamin,
W. (1936). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Visual Culture: Experiences in Visual
Culture.
Brammer,
J. P. (2019, June 18). The Difference Between Appreciating and Appropriating
Queer Culture. Retrieved from https://www.oprahmag.com/life/a23601818/queer-cultural-appropriation-definition/.
D'Addario,
D. (2014, July 15). Let's Talk About White Gays 'Stealing Black Female
Culture'. Retrieved from
https://www.thecut.com/2014/07/why-white-gays-steal-black-female-culture.html.
Glossary
of Drag Terms. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://enterthequeendom.com/glossary.
Pandell,
L. (2018, March 22). How 'RuPaul's Drag Race' Fueled Pop Culture's Dominant
Slang Engine. Retrieved from
https://www.wired.com/story/rupauls-drag-race-slang/.
Quenqua,
D. (2012, February 27). They're, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html
Sontag, S. (1964). Notes on “camp”
Street,
M. (2019, September 11). Do Not Erase Black Femmes In Your History of Gay
Slang. Retrieved from
https://www.papermag.com/gay-slang-history-black-femmes-2578325972.html?rebelltitem=3#rebelltitem3.
Subcultures and Sociology. (n.d.).
Retrieved from https://haenfler.sites.grinnell.edu/subcultures-and-scenes/underground-ball-culture/.
Villa,
E. (2019, July 26). What's The Tea?: A Glossary of Queer Slang. Retrieved from https://yr.media/identity/whats-the-tea-a-glossary-of-queer-slang/.
Vox.
How the LGBT community created voguing.
(2017). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ6fqQX_e9U
Yas.
(2016, June 27). Retrieved from https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Yas.
Yassss.
(2016, January 13). Retrieved from
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Yassss.
Wow, Srinidhi this piece is super interesting. Oh, also, it’s Zoe Goldstein here ;) Your piece is amazing, and I think that it should be shared with everyone. That way people understand where their slang comes from. I have been using “Drag ball slang” for a long, but not fully appreciating where it came from. I recently watched a show “Pose” (it isn’t sadly available in London, so I only just found it), and I’m guessing that you know about it if you wrote a piece on Drag Balls. But in case you don’t, it is a show set in the 1980s and it explores many different aspects during life in New York: ball culture, the rise of luxury, the downtown social and literary scene. While the show has a complex back story, the main notion is still the same. I feel very bad though like I have disrespected people by not understand the words that I use every day, such as yaaassss, queen, slay, work it. Every day you hear people use these words, but not fully understanding where the words they use come from. To connect your piece to our reading from class, I think that you piece relates to Benjamin, and he use of Aura which he defines as “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (p51). I feel like the show “Pose” while it is a great tv show, has problems. Because it was not actually made in 1980, and it is not based on real events, it loses some of the Aura that comes with the authentic truth. Overall your piece was amazing and super informative. Congratulations. <3
ReplyDeleteWow, you covered a lot of aspects of this topic in your post! What stood out to me were the connections to the Sender (2006) piece discussing Queer Eye that were in the examples you gave. The aspects of Drag Ball that have made it to the mainstream are largely related to the way people present themselves through their physical appearance. After RuPaul’s Drag Race aired, the makeup techniques on the show made it into the digital beauty community and many makeup tutorials started to feature the makeup styles and concepts used in Drag. As time goes on these techniques, like the Ball Room Slang, are used with less and recognition of their origins. Like in Queer Eye, people outside of the LGBT community are interested in watching content where they feel the people involved in Ball Room Culture have expertise. They are not necessarily interested in the history and culture that produced the practices they admire. This is the same in the adoption of Drag makeup techniques in the online makeup community. Because viewers are only interested in specific aspects of Ball Room culture, as the practices are made common in other communities, the original communities tend to stop receiving the credit they deserve. It is very unfortunate that the origins of Ballroom Slang and Drag Makeup techniques are receiving less and less credit, and we as viewers should strive to be mindful of the roots of things that have made it into today’s popular culture.
ReplyDeleteSender, K. (2006). Queens for a day: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the neoliberal project Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23(2).
-Emma Hutchins