7 Living and resisting intersectional oppression through ballroom
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Lydia Ayame Hiraide
Abstract
This chapter reads the second season of US TV series Pose (2019) through the lens of dreams and the dreamlike in order to underline how the series deals with intersectional oppression; the experience of harm and marginalisation by colluding structures of subjugation such as racism and heterosexism. Following the lives of queer Black and Latinx characters, the series centres marginalised communities living at the precarious interstices of structural violence for whom intersectional oppression functions as a source of substantial trauma. This chapter argues that Pose makes use of dream sequences and dreamlike aesthetics to comment on this trauma as it foregrounds the complex ways in which marginalised communities strategically and creatively navigate hostile environments. The first part draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, proposing queer heterotopias as dreamlike spaces in and of themselves. The second part moves to consider the explicit use of dream sequences in the series and borrows from Achille Mbembe’s vocabulary of necropower to specifically examine the ways in which the sequences address the precarity and death which haunt queer communities of colour. Thinking through the ways in which Pose employs the use of dreams and the dreamlike, we thus see the oneiric employed in the series as both a celebratory aesthetic and a critical allegory which exposes the traumatic gap between the ballroom and the world beyond its walls.
Abstract
This chapter reads the second season of US TV series Pose (2019) through the lens of dreams and the dreamlike in order to underline how the series deals with intersectional oppression; the experience of harm and marginalisation by colluding structures of subjugation such as racism and heterosexism. Following the lives of queer Black and Latinx characters, the series centres marginalised communities living at the precarious interstices of structural violence for whom intersectional oppression functions as a source of substantial trauma. This chapter argues that Pose makes use of dream sequences and dreamlike aesthetics to comment on this trauma as it foregrounds the complex ways in which marginalised communities strategically and creatively navigate hostile environments. The first part draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, proposing queer heterotopias as dreamlike spaces in and of themselves. The second part moves to consider the explicit use of dream sequences in the series and borrows from Achille Mbembe’s vocabulary of necropower to specifically examine the ways in which the sequences address the precarity and death which haunt queer communities of colour. Thinking through the ways in which Pose employs the use of dreams and the dreamlike, we thus see the oneiric employed in the series as both a celebratory aesthetic and a critical allegory which exposes the traumatic gap between the ballroom and the world beyond its walls.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures vii
- List of contributors viii
- Foreword xiii
- Acknowledgements xviii
- Introduction 1
- I Dream images 17
- 1 Dream images, psychoanalysis and atrocity 19
- 2 Dreaming and collecting dreams in occupied France 39
- 3 Dreams and thresholds 60
- 4 Condemned to oblivion 79
- ii Dreams as sites of resistance 97
- 5 Traumatic dreams as sites of witness and resistance in the life and work of Ingeborg Bachmann 99
- 6 The Third Reich of Dreams 120
- 7 Living and resisting intersectional oppression through ballroom 139
- 8 Dreams, justice and spectrality in Rêver peutêtre (Perchance to Dream) by Jean-Claude Grumberg 160
- III Violent states 179
- 9 Dreams, repetition and the real in Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine 181
- 10 Dreaming the unthinkable 199
- 11 ‘My hell dream’ 220
- 12 Shit, blood and sperm 238
- Afterword 258
- Index 263
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures vii
- List of contributors viii
- Foreword xiii
- Acknowledgements xviii
- Introduction 1
- I Dream images 17
- 1 Dream images, psychoanalysis and atrocity 19
- 2 Dreaming and collecting dreams in occupied France 39
- 3 Dreams and thresholds 60
- 4 Condemned to oblivion 79
- ii Dreams as sites of resistance 97
- 5 Traumatic dreams as sites of witness and resistance in the life and work of Ingeborg Bachmann 99
- 6 The Third Reich of Dreams 120
- 7 Living and resisting intersectional oppression through ballroom 139
- 8 Dreams, justice and spectrality in Rêver peutêtre (Perchance to Dream) by Jean-Claude Grumberg 160
- III Violent states 179
- 9 Dreams, repetition and the real in Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine 181
- 10 Dreaming the unthinkable 199
- 11 ‘My hell dream’ 220
- 12 Shit, blood and sperm 238
- Afterword 258
- Index 263
