This week on KinkVision, Nat and Kevin host a “ball” to discuss gear, clothing fetishes, roleplay, and the media that influenced these things with guests.

The Part One categories are: I Love a Man in Uniform, Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?, and Embody-Ody-Oddying the Role.

• In ballroom culture, “realness” means convincingly acting out mainstream social roles while using common cultural understandings of these roles. For example, most can assume that performing “executive realness” would involve wearing a suit, having a confident and professional demeanor, being from an upper class, etc. Categories at balls allow various kinds of gender and erotic expressions for how roles are enacted; however, judges impose strict criteria for how they evaluate the quality of performance for each category.
• This relates to the role that gear plays in the kink world because beyond simply fetishing particular articles of clothing, there are elements of realness and categories that determine standards of how looks ought to be worn and performed in. For various kinds of kink play, particular looks can have connotations that determine sexual roles and interests.
• On a broader level, members of ballroom culture, like kinksters, are queer outsiders who find creative ways to situate their queerness into typically heteronormative performances and roles. While ballroom members’ outsider status has been historically rooted in being a combination of gay, bi, pansexual, black, brown, low-income, trans, and/or nonbinary, some kinksters may share some of these outsider characteristics on top of the stigma of having a perversion.
• Marlon M. Bailey’s book, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit was used as a main source. The Queer Art of Failure by J. Halberstam was a secondary source.

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Nat - @thoughtful.fetishist (Instagram); @thoughtfulnat.bsky.social (Blue Sky)

Danny - @kinkmate13.0 (Instagram); @kinkmate13.bsky.social (Bluesky)

Gagmaniac - @gag.mania (Instagram); @gagmaniac.bsky.social (Blue Sky)

Sean - @capturedcamo (Instagram); @capturedcamo.bsky.social (Bluesky)

Ryder - @blackleathercowboy (Instagram)

Johan - @johdarg (Instagram); @johdarg.bsky.social (Bluesky)

Frank Hardy - @frankhardybound (Instagram); @hardyboybound.bsky.social (Bluesky)