Notes from a Night of Performance and Resistance
As Saidiya Hartman reminds us, Black life moves through the tension of mourning and survival, a condition intensified for Black queer and trans people whose very existence challenges the terms of the social order. In a world structured by anti-Blackness, where exhaustion is manufactured and joy is framed as indulgence, Black pleasure is a radical act of refusal. It is a practice of world-building amid dispossession.
This refusal, this reclamation, is what I found myself reflecting on last night at the Wiggle Room in Tiohtià:ke, where I attended a burlesque show wrapped in the language of tarot and transformation. The performances that unfolded were not simply acts of entertainment, but rituals—embodied acts of storytelling that spoke to the precarity and possibility of life under structures that seek to contain us.
Each performance was shaped by the energy of a different tarot card, an invocation of mysticism woven into movement and presence. The night had been playful, filled with laughter and cheers, until Phoenix Inana took the stage. Unlike the other performances, theirs was not burlesque—it was performance art, and it demanded silence. A rupture in the rhythm of the night.
Phoenix embodied The Devil, but through deliberate intervention, they transfigured the archetype—not as a warning of corruption, but as an opening toward self-possessed liberation. They wove The Devil into the figure of Lilith—a symbol of defiance, a body ungoverned, a refusal to be subdued. In dominant narratives, The Devil is a sign of excess, indulgence, a descent into desire. But in Phoenix’s hands, The Devil became something else entirely: an opening, a confrontation with the self, a refusal to abide by the moral logics that have long been used to discipline those cast as deviant. Their movement, measured and defiant, enacted what Mackey calls affective choreography—a performance that is not for spectacle but for insurgency, refusing the logics of discipline.
As Hortense Spillers reminds us, the body under colonial and patriarchal orders is always already marked for discipline. To reclaim the figure of The Devil—through Lilith, through the rejected feminine—is to refuse the very foundations of that discipline. The room held its breath as Phoenix moved—deliberate, magnetic, speaking in a language beyond words. They did not perform for an audience; they conjured something larger, something uncontainable. A reckoning with desire, with shame, with the ways we have been taught to fear our own hunger for pleasure, for freedom, for more. In that moment, The Devil was not a force of corruption but of possibility—the permission to exist outside of the constraints imposed upon us.
Before the performance began, I noticed a tarot card had been left on my seat—the Eight of Cups. I didn’t think much of it at first, but later that night, after stepping into the cool air outside the venue, I pulled out my phone and looked up its meaning. Departure. Choosing oneself. The aching, necessary act of walking away. The card’s imagery—cups abandoned, a figure moving forward—settled into my chest.
It was a lesson I have met before. One that keeps finding me. To leave is not to retreat but to carve out the possibility of elsewhere—to refuse the exhaustion of extractive institutions and instead move toward Black queer possibility. In the afterlife of slavery, where Black life is both hyper-visible and disposable, departure is not just a metaphor—it is a method of survival. We leave institutions, relationships, even versions of ourselves, because survival demands movement.
I carried that message with me as I lingered after the show, laughing, exhaling, held in the kind of embrace that only chosen family provides. The space between us—our breath, our joy, our indulgence in the moment—was a refusal. Not an escape, not a reprieve, but an insurgency. These nights are not outside of struggle; they exist in direct opposition to the anti-Black, capitalist systems that demand our exhaustion, our suffering, our depletion.
These spaces of performance, of radical belonging, exist within a lineage of Black queer world-making. One of the most enduring examples of this is ballroom—a subcultural movement rooted in the survival of Black and Latinx queer and trans communities. Ballroom was born out of necessity, a direct response to anti-Black and anti-queer exclusion from white-dominated LGBTQ+ spaces in the mid-20th century. It became not just a venue for performance but a site of kinship, a world where categories of gender, beauty, and realness were reimagined on Black and brown terms.
Ballroom operates as a Black queer counterpublic—an insurgent archive of survival, where kinship is built outside the logics of capitalist extraction, and where the aesthetics of gender, performance, and belonging are constantly being rewritten in real-time. While ballroom remains deeply rooted in Black and Latinx history, it has also grown into a space where others who have known displacement, resistance, and the urgency of chosen family can find belonging. As Godmother Phoenix Inana Sankofa LaBeija, she has taken up the role of mentor and guide, carrying forward the commitment to craft, care, and those who come after. Her position within ballroom is not just a title; it is an obligation—to those who seek space in a world that denies them room to breathe.
The world grinds us down. It tells us that we must earn rest. It frames joy as frivolous. And yet, we choose otherwise. We gather. We celebrate. We insist upon ourselves.
To persist is to resist, but to insist on joy is to demand livability—not as a concession, but as an act of abolitionist defiance, a refusal to let extraction be our only inheritance.
The Eight of Cups is a departure, yes, but it is also a return—to self, to possibility, to the world we are making together. As I walked out of the Wiggle Room, my fingers still tracing the Eight of Cups in my pocket, I felt something shift within me. Sometimes, the universe delivers its messages in grand gestures. And sometimes, they arrive in a performance piece that demands silence. A tarot card left on a seat. A night spent in the presence of those who see you fully.
And sometimes, those messages are simple but profound:
Keep going.
Keep choosing yourself.
Keep finding joy.
Because that, too, is resistance. That, too, is survival. And even when the world gives us nothing, we will make ourselves—together.
