Joseph Soto

Prof. Patterson-Faye
SOC 406 – Sociology Thesis Seminar
28 January 2022
“They’re Never Gonna Know the Real Ballroom”:
Mainstream Popular Culture, the Ballroom Scene, and a Social Politics of Representation

The ballroom scene is a Black/Latinx LGBTQ+ subculture that emerged in New York

City during the 1960s. The ballroom scene serves as a space of refuge for its members who

continue to struggle, survive, and find community amidst the material realities of their lives.

Throughout the turn of the twentieth century and on, various films and TV shows have shed a

light on the “underground” ballroom scene, and the overt presence of ballroom in mainstream

popular culture has evolved since Paris is Burning (1990). Members of the scene have

influenced mainstream popular culture, with many not getting the adequate compensation or

credit that was deserved.

This thesis interrogates the entanglement between ballroom’s ascendance into

mainstream popular culture and the coercive elements of imperialist white supremacist capitalist

patriarchy. I argue that the evolution of ballroom’s overt presence in mainstream media shifts the

way that members of the scene engage with notions of social mobility, intracommunal tensions,

representation politics, and respectability. Through qualitative research, observation, and

interviews with various members of the scene, this thesis highlights the tension that arises when

a subculture is commercialized. Utilizing queer of color critique, trans feminist thought, and

Black Marxist theory as my theoretical framework, this project hopes to construct a critical

approach to how both members and non-members of the scene engage with new forms of

representation and new opportunities that were previously unthinkable. Unlike previous studies

of the ballroom scene that have discussed representation and/or social mobility, arguably within
neoliberal reformist frameworks, my project bends toward a more liberatory approach to

understand and uncover the dynamics of people in and outside of the scene.