The Category is…“Opulence, You Own Everything!”

Sites of unique forms of relationality, 1980s ballrooms are portrayed in the tv show Pose (2018-2021) as sanctuaries of non-normative gender and sexual expression where NYC Black gay and transgender people who are shunned by society gather to have fun. In their celebration of the frivolous and the excessive, the balls appear utopian (Muñoz 2009) because they materialize the hopes and dreams of a marginalized collective with the ephemeral instantiations of joyful becoming in its most decadent expressions. Here, decadence does not just signal the utmost devotion to the self in its own search for jouissance, but is in fact the evidence of the abject’s very coming into being, of its dramatized subjectivation (Butler 1993) in an anti-Black world; decadence is a mode of Black queer performance that both encompasses and explodes social death as the ontological status and horizon in which Blackness is inscribed. Standing against the city’s racism and homotransphobia, all of which AIDS exasperates in the pathologization of the infected, the balls’ extravaganza and their obsession for the mundane suggest a turn to the ecstatic as a “pleasurable reckoning with everyday ruin in contemporary Black lives,” a critical invitation “to register and revere rapturous joy in the broken-down present” (Abdhur-Rahman 2018). Through an analysis of various scenes from Pose, this article explores the irreducible proximity of Black queer life and death and proposes a theory of decadence that reads the fabulous, the eccentric and the opulent as the ballroom’s specific response to that proximity, a response that informs not only the aesthetics of bodies, but the very modality of representation in contemporary cultural productions. Rooted in the subculture’s performances of realness, the Black decadent disavows mimetic representations of reality and substitutes its language with a complete surrender to the absurd of the narrative.