My performance is my world. Queer and normativity in the practices of New York’s ballroom culture

The central concept of the article is performance as a form of expression specific to non-normative people. In confrontation with the oppressive discourse of dominant groups, the body of an excluded individual and its metamorphoses in themselves appear to be an alternative way of non-alienated expression. This phenomenon is discussed via the example of the practices of New York’s ballroom culture — primarily via the example of the film Paris is Burning from 1990, directed by Jennie Livingston. In the ballroom community, black and non-heteronormative Americans found a safe space for experiments with their identity, thanks to which they could experience a form of capitalistic success through an ephemeral performance. However, these practices, despite their apparent subversiveness and emancipatory potential, did not have the ambition to change the status quo. They only allowed experiencing the feeling of social advancement within the existing system. The story that ballroom culture members in the 1980s told about themselves through their own performances was part of a unique, non-verbal discourse of excluded groups, which developed a specific communication code based on the human body, its ways of moving and its aesthetic metamorphoses.