Big winner of season 2 of “Drag Race France”, on the cover of ELLE this week, the drag queen Keiona presented herself to the general public as the “queen of voguing in France”. An art that fascinates, disturbs, and carries the history of an entire community.
To better understand the voguing phenomenon, we have to go back to the end of the 1960s in New York. In 1967, in Harlem, drag queen Crystal LaBeija, who participated in drag queen competitions, noticed that only white queens emerged victorious from this type of competition. She then decided to create her own Balls, drag queen competitions reserved for those who are African-American and Latina, and created the first “house”. It is a community of dancers led by a “mother”, originally a refuge for young queer people thrown out of their homes. The Ballroom becomes the theater of genres, the stage on which the different “houses” compete in dance battles, looks and poses. In these houses, racialized queer youth, but also trans women, sidelined from society.
To ironize about the racism they face, drag queens and trans women call “vogue fem” or “voguing”, a dance inspired by the covers of “Vogue” magazine. They extremely feminize hip movements (the catwalk) and hands using very linear pauses and squatting movements (the Duckwalk) or on the ground, sometimes close to contortion. Voguing becomes a means of self-expression and symbolizes everything they cannot have: luxury, magazine covers, fashion…
In 1980, the singer Madonna takes hold of the term. “It’s the first time that the word voguing landed in the mouths of white people,” explains Gabrielle Culland, director of the film “Paris is Voguing”. A popularization that poses a problem, since it is highlighted by a white, heterosexual woman. Ten years later, it is another white woman, Jennie Livingston, who dissects the phenomenon in her documentary film “Paris is Burning”.
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A work of transmission
At the end of the 2000s, a few racialized French drag queens, such as Lessindra Ninja, decided to transmit the art of voguing to France. An art that was still very little known at the time in Europe. “These are queens who have traveled and who know “Ballroom culture”. They have this desire to transmit it to Paris,” recalls Gabrielle Culland, who began filming “Paris is Voguing” in the early 2010s.
“Keiona embraced the culture of voguing quite naturally”
Parisian dance clubs and nightclubs then became a place of transmission for a generation of racialized French children. Gabrielle Culland also remembers her meeting with the drag queen Keiona, winner of season 2 of “Drag Race France”. “At the time, she was a drag queen before being a voguer, but she was one of the first to be interested in it, and one of the most involved on the scene. Keiona embraced the voguing culture quite naturally. » The latter will also end up at the head of the House of Revlon Paris, the French branch of the famous American house.
Since then, Ballroom culture has opened up to other communities. Vogue fem is popularized more widely in the art of dance, particularly contemporary dance, and inspires many choreographers. In the United States, the choreographers of pop stars like Rihanna or Beyoncé have been immersed in this culture and are popularizing this art in the eyes of the general public. Voguing becomes a cultural and political movement.
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“Voguing is a political space”
During an interview with AFP in 2017, Kiddy Smile, representative of voguing in France, confided: “Voguing is a political space in which you can be openly homosexual and of color. » Marginalized within the American LGBTQ+ community, “black and Latina drag queens have seized on the Black Power movement to politicize their words,” says Lissia Benoufella, a dancer with a master’s degree in gender studies, specialist in the subject.
Although it is increasingly publicized, particularly through the American version of Drag Race, voguing remains assimilated to the black and LGBTQ+ community, and therefore little accepted by part of society.
On July 29, O’Shae Sibley, a 28-year-old African-American dancer, was stabbed to death with a stab in the chest for dancing to a Beyoncé song at a gas station in Brooklyn (United States). -United). An alleged intentional homicide which caused great emotion in the African-American and LGBTQ+ communities. “In the United States, we talk about hate crimes, it is a homophobic and racist crime. We must keep in mind that it is not because the question of gender is much debated today that everyone is appeased with the question of homosexuality and this drama shows it,” concludes Gabrielle Culland.
2023-09-28 14:00:00
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