the 2025 Grammys and the politics of joy

when the margins become the center

The world was burning, and at the Grammys, they decided to dance.

This isn't a criticism. Throughout history, marginalized communities have turned to art and celebration not as escape, but as survival. From the birth of blues in plantation fields to the emergence of disco in underground gay clubs, music has served as both refuge and rebellion. The Harlem Renaissance was Black joy as resistance against Jim Crow. The Paradise Garage was a sanctuary when the streets offered none. The 67th Grammy Awards carried this torch forward, becoming a battleground where joy itself was an act of resistance.

As executive orders attempt to legislate trans people out of existence and states rush to dismantle DEI programs, Doechii stood on music's biggest stage, a Black queer woman clutching a golden gramophone for Best Rap Album. Her win was a middle finger to a system trying desperately to push people like her back into the shadows while pointing toward a future where Black queer women don't have to be "the first" or "the second" anymore. When she spoke to "all the Black girls watching," it felt like a war cry. Her words, “Don't allow anybody to project any stereotypes on you,” landed differently in a week when Florida banned DEI programs in higher education and companies nationwide began dismantling their diversity initiatives under political pressure. The timing transformed her acceptance speech from celebration to manifesto.

The night unfolded like a fever dream of possibility. Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club" performance transformed the Crypto.com Arena into a queer country fever dream, complete with rodeo clowns and a massive pink horse. But beneath the spectacle lay something deeper: a Midwestern escapee turning the very aesthetics of heartland America into a celebration of queer liberation. The song's narrative — a small-town girl finding freedom in a drag bar — felt especially potent against the backdrop of increasingly aggressive anti-drag legislation across the country.

This is where we need to talk about joy — not as distraction, but as disruption. The entertainment industry has mastered the art of performing progressiveness while maintaining the status quo: MTV puts black squares on Instagram while signing checks to Tucker Carlson's advertisers, Netflix adds a trans character to every show while donating to anti-trans politicians, awards shows channel real anger into palatable moments of "awareness" that change nothing. We've seen how easily cultural moments can be co-opted into feel-good narratives that serve the status quo — the sanitization of Martin Luther King Jr.'s radical vision into inspirational quotes, the transformation of Pride from a riot into a corporate branding opportunity, the reduction of feminist rebellion into girlboss capitalism.

The philosopher Audre Lorde wrote about the erotic as power, about pleasure as a form of knowing that threatens systems of oppression. She understood that real joy — not the manufactured, marketable kind — terrifies those in power because it proves their control isn't total. This Grammy ceremony seemed to grasp this distinction. When Lady Gaga declared "trans people are not invisible" while accepting her award, the cameras caught something telling: a room full of music's biggest stars nodding in agreement. Let's be clear: watching wealthy celebrities pat themselves on the back for their progressiveness won't save us. But there's something else happening here too.

When Chappell Roan transformed country music iconography into a queer fantasy, she wasn't just putting on a show - she was demonstrating how to steal the master's tools and build something new. The performance mattered not because of who nodded along in the audience, but because somewhere in Missouri, a kid like the one Roan used to be might have seen it and recognized a possibility they never knew existed.