Techno-kitsch.

Vogue, violence and the night at House of Apocalypstick

Abstract

Who can inhabit the night? What kinds of senses and affects shape queer and trans of color nightlife? How do we deal with the force of violence when the sun goes down in a country like Mexico? Queer and trans visibility in Mexico City have generated a great academic interest, shaping research agendas, theories and interventions that sustain an impetus for categorization, and for the production of a genealogy of sexual and gender dissidence in the Americas. However, the matrix that informs such knowledge formations are enmeshed within a Western rationality that responds to a classed and racialized elitism of academic institutions. The knowledge of the night, which revolves around issues of corporeality, materiality and affectivity, etc., of sexual and gender dissident collectivities, also self-called transmarilenchas, informs a larger feminist praxis around affect, pleasure and care. The g-local expansion of neoliberalism over the Mexico City translates into complex processes of gentrification, privatization and commodification of public spaces that support queer and trans of color nightlife. These neoliberal moves toward a “productive” citizenry are further complicated by the necropolitical machine of the 21st century, the state-church-narcocorporation. In this sense, how does violence shape queer and trans night sensibilities? Despite the necroliberal violence of recent years, sexually dissident groups have insisted on a decorporalization of violence through movement, reclaiming values ​​of femininity, and thus challenging the andropatriarchal borders that exclude the night’s affects from the body. At the intersection of performance and affect, this article deals with the cultural practices of House of Apocalipstick, a dance collective composed of trans women and men, lesbians, queens, transvestites, drag queens and kings who practice voguing. In particular, I tease out “the ethics of aesthetics” that stands out in the novel Such is Life in Banana Republic(2014) written by the house mother Franka Polari, as well as in the vogue performance of documentary House of Apocalipstick (2015). Beyond challenging traditional forms of writing, literality and capture, the fusion between body, music and movement plays with transtemporal/transregional affects of voguing, whose origins date back to Harlem’s trans/queer counterculture in the 80s. House of Apocalipstick thus exposes a feminine-affective kinesthesis around voguing that, anchored in nightlife, emerges as a bodily twist to mediate the consequences of daily violence, reclaiming other ways of feeling nighttime pleasures from a feminist praxis referred as techno-kitsch.