Abstract

TENORIO, David. Techno-kitsch. Vogue, violence, and the night at House of Apocalypstick. Cuad. CILHA [online]. 2021, vol.22, n.1, pp.372-394. ISSN 1852-9615.  http://dx.doi.org/10.48162/rev.34.00010.

At the intersection of performance and affect, this article deals with the cultural practices of House of Apocalipstick, a dance collective composed of trans women and men, lesbians, queens, transvestites, drag queens and kings who practice voguing. I tease out “the ethics of aesthetics” that stands out in the novel Such is Life in Banana Republic (2014) written by the house mother Franka Polari, as well as in a performance of the documentary House of Apocalipstick (2015). Beyond challenging traditional forms of writing, literality and capture, the fusion between body, music and movement plays with the transtemporal/transregional affect of voguing, whose origins date back to Harlem’s trans/queer counterculture in the 80s. House of Apocalipstick thus exposes a feminine-affective kinesthesis around voguing that, anchored in nightlife, emerges as a bodily twist to mediate the consequences of daily violence, reclaiming other ways of feeling nighttime pleasures from a feminist praxis referred to as techno-kitsch. I thus insist on the de-corporealization of violence through sensorial practices that are unraveled through popular queer nightlife.

Keywords : Vogue; Tecno-kitsch; Feminist praxis; Night performance; Mexico.

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