Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

This talk explores visual art and digital media, including TikTok, to demonstrate how queer and trans people of color negotiate loneliness and isolation via performances of fabulousness. Fashion skeptics, from Veblen to Simmel and beyond, have long held that style works primarily as a tool to keep class boundaries in tact. But for queer and trans people of color, performances of fabulousness are a vital strategy, tool and means of living.

madison moore is an artist-scholar, DJ and assistant professor of Queer Studies in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. madison is the author of Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), a cultural analysis of fabulousness. He has lectured at the Yale School of Drama, the Barbican, the Perth Festival, The School of Life Melbourne, Columbia College Chicago, Performance Space Sydney, American Realness and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. madison is currently writing a book about ephemeral traces, rave scenes and queer of color undergrounds.

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