Ballroom as Speculative Care: Black Queer Kinship and Health Beyond Recognition

Abstract: This article theorizes speculative care as a present-tense health methodology emerging from the kiki ballroom scene in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Drawing on abolitionist social work, critical autoethnography, and Black queer theory, it argues that ballroom's relational infrastructures—house networks, mutual aid, temporal rituals, and embodied practice—constitute a health system beyond institutional recognition. Speculative care operates through repetition, presence, and refusal, sustaining Black queer and trans life amid racialized, linguistic, and biomedical exclusion. The article intervenes in French and Francophone medical humanities by reimagining health as improvised collective practice grounded in survival, relation, and return.