Act I, Prologue: Oliver’s Perplexity

Scene I: Curiosity and Subculture

Sitting in his tiny room in this giant western city, Oliver took a sip of his latte, bitter as usual. The environment is a tricky monster, Oliver always thought so, tricky in the way of growing up as a queer in east Asia, tricky in the way of not knowing his position or where to belong, tricky in the transition of mindset from the eastern to the western context.

Figure 1, Cover of Attitude, a Mainstream Gay Magazine It’s common to find that much of the coverage in western mainstream publications remains geared toward white readers. Using critical discourse analysis, Asian queer people have been marginalized by simply been ignored their existence or employed existing stereotypes about Asians in general (Chongsuk Han, 2008). It’s hard for Asian queer to fit in or to find a suitable place within this mainstream queer community. Thereby, maintaining queer as largely a ‘white’ category and relegating Asian queer to the margins of the community (Chong‐suk Han, 2008).

A subculture is a group of people who share a set of secondary values (Peranda, 2017). In the current situation, marginalized queer people are within a subculture. As most marginalized groups do, marginalized queer people tend to stick together, they create subcultures within the subculture. “It’s a shelter, a comfort zone, it’s a place to feel belonged. It’s a utopia of personal liberation.” Says Zeikowitz (2004), Subcultures are diverse, and there are many forms of expression ranging from performance, art, and music to fashion, and lifestyle. Perhaps out of curiosity, over the past years, Oliver has gained his interests in queer studies and body movements as well as exploring and experiencing underground events to give him a better understanding of the community and the subculture that he is supposed to belong to.

Figure 2, Punks Courtesy

Scene II: Ballroom, Voguing and Kinship

Scrolling his phone, Oliver accidentally found a very expressive and queer form of dance – voguing. Which is usually held in ballrooms. Gradually, he became more and more fascinated, and he wanted to know more.

Figure 3, Dancers voguing at nightclub Mars in New York City, 1988 Starting from its history. In the early 1970s, Black and Latinx gay, trans and queer people developed a thriving subculture in house balls, where they could express themselves freely and find acceptance within a marginalized community (Morgan, 2020). It unveiled, grew, and thrived globally in the past decades. Till nowadays, it has been evolving into a place that welcomes everyone.

From its inception, the early ballroom houses offered security for Black and Latinx queer, gay and trans people. These houses became more like families than teams, led by house “mothers” or house “fathers” to guide and groom their house “children” for the world.

“In ballroom, houses offer the primary infrastructure upon which the scene is built, ” explains Julian Kevon Glover (2016), assistant professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Dance and Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University in an interview. “It provides the basic but special kind of kinship structure and demonstrates alternative possibilities for what kinship can look like. Moving away from this reliance on one's biological family, and complicating ideas of a family of choice.”

Figure 4, House of Ninji

This special kinship and social structure within this underground subculture got Oliver’s attention, “What do people usually do there? What’s the origin? What makes ballroom special from other dance genres, social events and mainstream everyday life?” He keeps wondering about these questions…

Balls held the so-called competitions between houses by categories. Categories range from the face (the judging of a house member’s beauty) to the body (the appreciation of a house member’s curves), to the runway, to performances including vogue. Vogue is a type of improvisational dance inspired by the poses of models in fashion magazines (Chatzipapatheodoridis, 2017). There are different ways of voguing, the “old way” is the one that dates back to the 1970s and 1980s. Then in the 1990s, thanks to the song Vogue by Madonna which surprisingly brought this subculture into the mainstream spotlight, at that moment of Figure 6, New Way Performance, 2018 bloom, other elements of the dance were ushered in, to form two new types of vogue dancing, which are called “new way” and “vogue fem” (Gavaldon, 2021). While the “new way” is characterized by the precise movement of the arms, wrists and hands, “vogue fem” is known for breaking down into either fast, angular movements or much slower, sensual and deliberate movements. The five fundamental elements of vogue include hands, duckwalk, catwalk, floor performance as well as spins and dips (which are often erroneously referred to as “shablams” or “death drops”) according to Gavaldon (2021).

Figure 5, Old Way Performance, 1998 Figure 7, Madonna at Wembley Stadium, London, 1990

Figure 8, Five Elements of Voguing

Willi Ninja, known as the godfather, ground-breaking voguing dancer as well as father of the legendary house of Ninja described voguing as a specific way of throwing attitudes, shade, or criticizing opponents on the dance floor (Paris is Burning, 1990). But, beyond a dance style and competition, voguing came to represent much more. “Voguing is very much about telling one's story through movement... that is one of the main differences of voguing compares to any other form of dancing. And that for me, because of who is doing it, is very much an act of resistance to an entire world that not only tells us that our lives are devoid of meaning but also tells us that we have nothing to contribute,” says Glover (2016) “It's a kind of self-liberation, an embodied kind of resistance, to these cultural messages. To say, ‘No, I have a story to tell, and my story is going to be so convincing, that in this particular atmosphere you're going to be able to clearly understand what it is that I'm saying.”

Scene III: VR Through the Eyes of a Queer

From the perspective of queer people, Oliver thinks when speaking of current VR technology and queer access, from the very beginning a queer sensibility in tech is a more radical concept. Of course,people aremaking VR for better traffic and better health care, games and porn, but they’re not making it necessarily transcend where we need to be in our understanding of gender and queerness.

This problem makes Oliver think of how can queer sensibility in tech be a less conceptual expression? How to transcend our understanding of gender, identity, and queerness through VR? In addition, it seems to be common sense that current VR experiences encourage movements/participation of the body, which makes him think from the opposite, what would happen if there were no/fewer body movements involved? What can virtual reality bring us while our body is physically constrained? And finally, can we transcend our understanding of gender, identity, and queerness through immersive experiences in VR while body has been physically limited?