Entry · catalog no. 0057
body
/ /ˈbɑdi/ /BAH-dee
noun · New York City — Harlem ballroom; now national · 1980s
✓ Verified
1.
A ball category in which competitors walk to be judged on the shape and proportion of the body, distinct from categories judging clothing, face or realness.
“The category is Body — clear the floor.”
2.
Outside the ballroom, a figure striking enough to be a fact about a person.
“She has body and she knows it.”
3.
Called out as an exclamation of approval when someone's shape is the whole point.
“Body, body, body.”
Origin & Attribution
A ballroom term from the Black and Latino LGBTQ ball scene centered in Harlem, formalized as the categories multiplied through the 1970s and 1980s so that everyone at a ball had something to walk in. Dorian Corey explains the logic in Paris Is Burning: the categories were made so that whatever you had — a nice body, or fashion, or a pretty face, or the ability to pass — there was a floor for it. The general she has body usage moved outward from ballroom into wider Black speech and then into the mainstream. It is not gym slang, and it is not a television invention, though television carried it further.
1980s
Ball categories proliferate in Harlem; Body becomes one of the standing categories
1990
Paris Is Burning records MCs calling Body and Sexy Body on the floor
2013
Marlon M. Bailey documents Body as a ballroom performance category in scholarly terms
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
New York City — Harlem ballroom; now national · 1980s
Spoken by
Black and Latino LGBTQ ballroom communities; then Black queer speech generally; then broad adoption
$BODYThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Rising36 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
80/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1990
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Paris Is Burning, dir. Jennie Livingston
1990
■
+ Cite a sourceMarlon M. Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps (University of Michigan Press)
2013
See also