A community whose values contradict the present
TIMELINE
4 weeks
TEAM
Emily Liu
Ricky Chen
Tara Banatwala
Jessica Lai
TOOLS
Figma
ROLE
Design Research
Transition Design
Systems Thinking
Information Design
Using design research methods we examined a community of practice and how they are shaped by systems of interaction, coming up with a socio-geographical map of the drag community that tracks it’s transformation throughout history.
Link to Final PDF
WHAT/WHO IS THE DRAG COMMUNITY?
Before the drag queens we know today, the drag community flourished in the Ballrooms of Harlem, New York. Starting as masquerade balls hosted by African American fraternal organizations in the 1800s, these events became associated with the gay community during the Harlem Renaissance. As broader culture continued to criminalize gay culture, New York’s gay community began to use underground clubs and speakeasies as an opportunity for self-expression and liberation. In the 1970s, in neighborhoods like Harlem and Washington, Black and Latinx members of the LGBTQ+ communities fostered their own havens, establishing the drag “ball” culture where family houses competed against one another in ballroom categories.
The Ballrooms of Harlem, a community rooted in a Black and Latinx experience of LGBTQ+ identity have laid the foundation for drag culture as we know it today. As the drag community started to enter the mainstream from exposure to the internet and reality TV shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, the drag audience broadened and new industries formed, changing the community’s power dynamics and hierarchies – contradicting its original values.
Photos by Anja Matthies
Detail from “Values” & “Modernization”
Detail from “Present”
MAPPING APPROACH
To fully understand Harlem’s drag community, we looked into Harlem’s rich ball history, and its role in the transition into the largely digitized drag scene of today. We created a mirrored map reflecting the similar and contrasting elements between the community of the past and present, highlighting the inverted hierarchies between performers and audiences – where drag in the past valued performers greater compared to the present scene, where the greatest stakeholder is the audience. These three different tiers of stakeholders are visually categorized by color.
The connection between the past and present is a set of shared values, while the threshold for change is a bridge of modernization. In the “past” section, there are negative feedback loops between events and values with the same arrows pointing towards values returning to event points, showing the past preserving the core values of drag. These values are also what connect past events to those of the present; however, the events of the present no longer loop back to these values; rather, positive feedback loops develop between other present events as well as points under “modernization”.
These new positive feedback loops, disconnected to the values, and continuously reconnecting with modernization, eventually reveal events of the present beginning to contradict with original community values.
Outside of the main map is the external stakeholders: event points which are untouched by values, unaffected by modernization, share commonalities despite changes in time, and extend past the scope of hierarchies contained in the community. They are the drag community’s ultimate source of funding – the ones least personally connected to the community, yet most relied on.
In addition to the macro hierarchy, there are micro hierarchies represented within both the past and present. In the past, there is greater balance in community hierarchies because of a shared value of family; while in the present, the lack of this value leads to many different power structures with performers consistently at the bottom.
Detail from “Past”