Serving Realness: Exploring and Documenting Ballroom Kiki Culture, Community, and Gender in Arizona

The Kiki scene, an autonomous youth subculture within the broader House Ballroom community, has recently emerged in Arizona, serving as a critical space for Black and Latinx LGBTQIA+ individuals to find belonging, resistance, and creative self-expression. Amidst Arizona's sociopolitical landscape, where transgender identities face legal discrimination, Kiki house members navigate complex intersections of identity, community building, and gender performance. This dissertation explores the lived experiences, perceptions, and aspirations of the Arizona Ballroom Kiki community through Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), Participatory Action Research (PAR), autoethnography, and qualitative interviews. The first paper employs autoethnography to examine the researcher's personal journey as a white non-binary transmasculine individual navigating identity and gender expression within the predominantly Black and Latinx LGBTQIA+ Ballroom Kiki scene, a community that embraces femininity in all its diverse forms. The second paper presents findings from semi-structured interviews with members of two Kiki houses, uncovering themes related to their perceptions of Ballroom culture, aspirations for representing their stories, and concerns in working with researchers, such as cultural appropriation and misrepresentation. The Arizona Ballroom Kiki scene is a testament to the resilience, creativity, and talent of its members, who have built a thriving community despite facing numerous challenges. The third paper examines the application of CBPR and PAR methodologies through themes developed from focus group interviews with Kiki house members, discussing ethical and practical considerations of conducting collaborative research with marginalized LGBTQIA+ communities. Key findings underscore the importance of honoring the history and legacy of Ballroom, cultural preservation, authentic representation, community agency, empowerment, and equitable tangible benefits for the community and its members. The study highlights the transformative potential of the Ballroom scene in fostering resilience, creativity, and social change while addressing the challenges of navigating power dynamics and the potential for unintended harm from the actions of researchers, policymakers, and society at large. By centering the voices and experiences of the Arizona Ballroom Kiki community, this research contributes to understanding the sociocultural significance of Ballroom culture and its impact on LGBTQIA+ People of Color, emphasizing the need for inclusive, participatory, and empowering approaches in documenting and supporting marginalized communities.