This panel reflects on glocalised musicking, cultural hybridisation and its propogation via physical, digitised and mediatised Contact Zones in various Queer and Trans (sub)cultural performing communities – namely underground Drag and lô tô in Vietnam, and underground Ballroom in Southeast Asia and broader Asia. Uncritical accounts of these communities’ growth invoke the influence of mainstream success of Drag media franchises, growing media exposure of Underground ballroom, and performers gaining a wider audience through platformised means, suggesting the hinge on Western and Capital-derived momentums. A closer look at these performing ecologies points to queer performative worldings that tread ambivalently between Fernando Ortiz’s conception of transculturation and Robert Bernasconi’s philosophical invocation of the “porosity of cultures”.

This roundtable elucidates how members and performers in these communities respond to ever-shifting flows of aesthetic and performance knowledges, demonstrating multifaceted negotiations of their identitarian/cultural positionalities in the face of societal marginalisation. Huynh Tan Gia Bao highlights lô tô performers’ usage of voice, sound, and embodied performance to construct queer belonging while resisting state surveillance, economic instability, and gendered erasure, exemplifying queer negotiations of power, sonic politics, and digital labor within the platformized music industry. Kat Joplin’s paper provides an analysis of the performance repertoire, aesthetic stylisations and costuming choices of Drag Queen performers in Ho Chi Minh City, providing insight into modern Vietnamese drag identity shaped by oscillating influences of local/indigenous queer culture and the rapid flow of globalised and marketised Drag culture. Jelo’s paper offers a framework of understanding queer embodied labour, particularly individual and communal labor performance within Ballroom, and how it influences perceptions, navigation, and resilience in a socio-political landscape marked by intersectional oppression, addressing a critical research gap by exploring the cultural production and sustainability strategies of queer individuals within the community. Shayus’ paper reads a selection of performance works from Southeast Asia engaging with the dance system of Vogueing and underground Ballroom’s linguistic and gestural vernaculars through a Muñozian lens of Brownness, and elaborates how these works articulate various positionalities, relationalities and social realities in Southeast Asian Ballroom and embody the aesthetic and affective experience between belonging and alienation. Jared Jonathan’s presentation delves into their artistic research around the circulations of Black-originated dance knowledges and varying reconciliations with Southeast Asian identit(ies), and concludes with a short performance that meditates on such a reconciliation.