Each month, we profile someone connected to CBRC, featuring them in The Update, our monthly newsletter. Check out the Feb 2026 newsletter here.
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Vincent Mousseau (they/he) is a social worker, researcher, and community organizer based in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke, where they are also a member of the kiki ballroom scene. In the past, they have been involved in the Advance alliance and CBRC’s Summit. Vincent is currently completing a PhD in Health at Dalhousie University. Their research investigates how Black queer and trans communities have built care practices, kinship, and mutual aid — particularly through kiki ballroom culture.
Vincent recently presented at Summit 2025. Their presentation, titled “Where Kiki Meets Care: Reimagining Mental Health for Black Queer and Trans Communities,” highlighted how ballroom serves as a site of care and resistance for Black 2S/LGBTQIA+ folks. “The framing in mainstream academic research has a tendency to individualize. One of the first lessons ballroom teaches us is that it’s about collective becoming, not individual self-discovery,” Vincent says. “And that's a fundamentally different worldview than traditional, individualistic metrics of health.”
The kiki ballroom scene in New York City developed in close relationship with HIV prevention work supported by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, particularly efforts to engage younger Black queer and trans people in testing, as HIV transmission rates were — and remain — significantly higher among these communities. “Even our origin point was always about the fact that our lives have value. That they're worth fighting for in the ways that we determine,” Vincent says. “If health interventions for HIV prevention actually worked for our communities, we wouldn't need to develop these resources. And yet, we have.”
Speculative care is a concept that Vincent is currently developing. “Speculative care is a present-tense, relational model of care that exists outside of institutional structures. Essentially, it’s acting without certainty. It’s like, ‘I don’t know that this is going to work, but I know we can get through this.’” It emerges in a context where Black life is routinely exposed to institutional harm, situating care beyond state systems as an ethical and practical necessity. To engage in speculative care, Vincent argues, Black queer and trans communities draw on a deep, embodied knowledge of systems and how those systems shape their lives. As they put it, “how can we assume that the health system is going to stand up for us?” Speculative care, then, is an adaptive, improvisational, and collective form of care.
In ballroom, the house structure is a kinship system that can be seen as a form of speculative care infrastructure. “There are house roles — like parents and godparents — but also legends and icons, who have been doing this work for decades. They act as forms of mentorship that prepare people for potential harm, or help them respond to harm,” Vincent says. “In a world that tells you that your life doesn’t matter, what does it mean to have created an entire infrastructure around you that tells you that you’re worthy of care?”
Entering ballroom as a site of research flipped the research heuristic on its head: “Ballroom asserts that care is already happening here despite you. It asks you to pull away from your position as a researcher and lean into an affective, relational connection,” Vincent explains. “That’s congruent with a lot of the messages in Africentric and Indigenous forms of research.”
Visit Vincent’s website to learn more about their work.
If you are in Halifax on February 12, you can attend Vincent’s public lecture on ballroom, Black queer community, and collective survival.
Photo: Vincent Mousseau
“ If these systems were never meant to hold the knowledges that our ancestors gave us, then necessarily we need to find other ways to do that. My knowledge starts from the certainty that care is already happening elsewhere. In the wake of institutional violence, it is a much more productive area for us to start doing health intervention where care is already happening, than it is to put our energy into systems that were designed to kill us.”
