Advanced search⦠Manage your Profile. He is broadly invested in the aesthetic, sonic and spatial strategies queer and trans people of color use to both survive and thrive in the five alarm fire of everyday life. I am an artist-scholar whose research, teaching and critical creative practice converges at the intersections between and among Black queer aesthetics, performance studies, fashion, queer of color critique, subculture, popular music, queer nightlife, contemporary art, and visual culture.
With a practice that cuts into and across scholarship, DJing, curating public programs, and performance lectures β with an eye towards expanding into video and electronic music production β the central idea that shapes the contours of my work is Black queer worldmaking. My practice is broadly invested in the aesthetic, sonic and spatial strategies queer and trans people of color use to both survive and thrive in the face of rolling catastrophe.
That is, I point to the dynamics, impacts and power structures of oppressive systems while highlighting the urgency of imagining otherwise. For example, my first book, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric Yale University Press, April , explores street style, the international Ballroom community and queer of color aesthetics to ask how exuberant style and eccentricity work as sites of resistance, rebellion and reimagining for queer and trans people of color.
The book is an experimental manifesto that attends to the dance floor as a site of resiliency, pleasure and disorderly worldmaking, positioning the nightclub as one of the most significant cultural institutions to emerge in the 20th century. Back to search. Save Cancel. More Info.
Full Text. Research Research Overview. Background Education and Training. Study Affiliations Visualize it Affiliations. American Studies Association. Teaching Teaching. Melissa Blanco Borelli, madison moore. Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric. Yale University Press, Yale University.
