“This exhibition was not aimed at inviting people into the Ballroom space as that’s not my responsibility, but to share some of the aesthetic tools from the culture and teach folks how to ethically engage with Ballroom from the community understandings of interaction I had come to learn through my own engagement.”

This quote is from a longer vignette that spills onto page 99 of the dissertation, right in the middle of an outlined genealogy of artistic experimentation and training that led me develop a method for my dissertation I call the ethnographic kiki — an emergent performance-based ethnographic method that became crucial to my dissertation’s focus on genre, the semiotic meaning-capacity of the dancing body, and anti-colonial discourses in Puerto Rico’s queer/trans Ballroom scene. In Ballroom, kikis or kiki balls are smaller, intimate performance and competition spaces, made to have a low-pressure environment for people to explore their artistic skills and cultural socialization.

As someone who became a performer-participant in Puerto Rico’s Ballroom scene as I began to explore the category Face after encouragement from friends and members of the scene, this quote reflects the type of ethnographic refusal (Simpson 2009) that I tried to curate through the writing of the larger project. How could one write about a space they were invited into without subjecting it to the violent colonial optics of capture and recording that are so often part of the ethnographic method – especially in discourse-oriented sociocultural linguistic traditions? I was inspired by Vidali (2020)’s work on ethnographic theater, where I could adapt a performance-based approach to the kiki format of Ballroom culture, where knowledge production lied in the outcomes of dancing and interacting with the audience that could not be easily replicated on the page. What results is a method of data collection in my writing where I patchworked together vignettes and journal notes of my reflections on proprioception in dance, interactions during battle rounds of Ballroom categories, discussions on Puerto Rican diaspora in Ballroom, and just a few pictures and curated moments that my interlocutors allowed me to share.

Despite the profound theorization the kiki allowed me to exercise, the ball and Puerto Rican Ballroom themselves remain relatively opaque (Glissant 1997) in the dissertation, honoring a type of commitment to Ballroom’s call to not continue the widespread appropriation of its semiotic repertoire without ethical engagement with its artistic and political traditions on its own terms. I can tell you a lot about my own experience learning to perform cuntiness, but to truly be cunty you will have to find a Ballroom scene, build those relationships, and do the historical and kinesthetic homework to let it transform your understanding of gender, the body, and trans diasporic cultural production.

Édouard Glissant. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Audra Simpson. 2007.  “On ethnographic refusal: Indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship.” Junctures: the journal for thematic dialogue.

Debra Vidali. 2020.  “Ethnographic theater making: Multimodal alchemy, knowledge, and invention.” American Anthropologist, 122, no. 2: 394-409.

Dozandri Mendoza. 2025. Dando Cunt and Walking with the Transcestrxs: The Semiotics of Puerto Rican Ballroom Performance. University of California, Santa Barbara, PhD.