Paris is Burning

In this Unit, I want to look at the way in which the film Paris is Burning and, more importantly, those represented in the film, are theorized and politicized by different thinkers. It shows the fault-lines of different, salient political/theoretical positions and the difficulties and complexities that exist in negotiating them.

My Fundamental Point: There is a grave danger in being “sucked into” a discussion about the lives and social activities of the people represented in the film by Livingston where we are then invited to interpret and assess the political value of what they are doing. Is it reactionary? Subversive? Liberatory? They are several problems with this stance.

First, we pay no attention to ourselves we, the subjects, who are discussing people we have turned into objects. But our own cultural-political position is not neutral and this is going to affect what we perceive and how we interpret. In dropping out the relevance of our own political position, we are under the false impression that we proceed in a neutral way.

Second, the most important thing to be ignored when we forget that we have become subjects by making “others” objects, is that we are implicated in a power-relation. Whose voices are heard? Who has the power to interpret and why? Thus, the following questions become salient: What does it mean for me (T. Bettcher) as an instructor to choose this film and have my students watch it? What does it mean for you (the students) to watch it, comment on it, etc.? It raises material questions about who was benefited economically and in other material ways in the making of the film. It raises questions about who benefits from the showing of the film and why. It raises questions about who has access to CSULA and why. It raises questions about who has access to the class Intro to Trans/Feminisms and why.  The questions go on.

Third, when one adopts this stance of “neutral interpreter” one presumes that one is in the position (has the cultural and conceptual resources) to understand the cultural activities one is interpreting as either subversive or not. But there is a kind of epistemic arrogance in assuming that one can make assessments about lives and practices one knows very little about. Why should one suppose one has a solid understanding of the meaning of a drag ball and the activities which occur within it when one is entirely unfamiliar with the culture except through what one has learned by means of the film itself!!! Thus, I argue for the importance of epistemic humility.

bell hooks “Is Paris Burning?”

In this article, hooks critiques both the participants involved in drag-ball culture as well as the director of the film (Jennie Livingston) – and also uncritical white folks who watch the film for entertainment. In my view, it is important to distinguish between hooks’ critique of ball culture itself and her critique of the film (Livingston’s choices, the attitudes of those who watch it, etc.). While I am sympathetic the latter critiques, I am concerned that hooks may not sufficiently interrogate her own subject-position in her assessment of ball culture.

(1)   hooks’ critique of ball culture: According to hooks there are different kinds of drag: subversive and reactionary. She recognizes the possibility of drag to challenge and subvert existing norms about gender. However, she also points to ways in which racialized drag can enact racist/sexist views. She points to ways in which black men have been emasculated (culturally castrated) in white racist culture. She sees heterosexual black men responding to this by denigrating the feminine – manifested in both misogyny and homophobia. She points to black male comedians she sees as using drag to ridicule black womanhood. And she sees this as flowing from the way in which this drag is also used as a racist strategy of “feminizing” black men through drag. For hooks, subversive “gender bending and blending on the part of black males has always been a critique of phallocentric masculinity in traditional black experience” (p. 147).

Her concern is that the possibility of this subversion is overturned when what passes as femininity is actually white femininity (idealized, prized, and assumed to be the unmarked norm).  Her concern is that what appears to be valued, emulated, and sought after in the ball culture represented in Paris is Burning is the womanhood (femininity) of “the ruling class.” In this way the drag performed is reactionary because it evidences agreement with the dominant, racist, and sexist values of culture more generally. 

She also complains that drag balls exemplify a kind of masculinity she finds disturbing (from a feminist perspective). She finds the competition of the balls to be masculinist, and she sees the spectators in the ball to be taking up an objectifying “male gaze” of the performers.

(2)   hooks’ critique of Livingston: “Livingston appears unwilling to interrogate the way assuming the position of outsider looking in, as well as interpreter, can and often does, pervert and distort one’s perspective” (p. 153).

hooks’ chief complaint is that Livingston does not appear conscious that her own subject-position creates a possible political distortion. By passing this

documentary off as “neutral” Livingston’s whiteness is treated as invisible. Why does this matter? Because Livingston’s film apparently presents the drag-

ball  as a location of radical gender subversion as well as celebration, the reactionary elements (discussed above) are overlooked or discounted. In other

words: Livingston’s own political position covers up the way in which the drag performances are reactionary and with this, the way in which white femininity

is culturally constituted as an ideal.

Other specific criticisms of Livingston:

(A)               Livingston erases the relevant material conditions. (She receives considerable financial and honorary compensation for the film – what about those people in the film?)

(B)               Livingston doesn’t portray the men in the film discussing their relationship to family. “At no point in Livingston’s film are the men ask to speak about their connections to a world of family and community beyond the drag balls” (p. 154).

Note: This complaint is actually false, since at least one conversation about family does occur in the film. This conversation brings out the fact that at least some of the folks involved in the drag balls have been abandoned by their families. An important theme in the documentary is the way in which houses come to function as family structures.

(C)               The murder of Venus Xtravaganza is glossed over. There is no mourning  - hence the celebratory aspects of the film are emphasized.

Note: This seems to me to be a misinterpretation of the film. The message is that this type of murder is not uncommon for transsexual women. It is part of life. The film treats it that way, and in doing so underscores the brutality of it. 

(3)   Critique of hooks: While I am sympathetic to some of her critiques of Livingston, I am worried that she also fails to sufficiently interrogate her own subject position. In particular, she assumes that she is in a good position to interpret the meaning of the drag balls and the activities associated with it. But I see no reason why I should think she is in such a good position. She, too, is “an outsider looking in.” Yet she approaches the issue as if she were an expert – as if she could interpret the meaning of drag culture without any difficulties. This is an arrogant assumption, in my opinion. 

For hooks, drag is assessed solely in terms of the question whether or not it is reactionary/subversive. She does not, however, sufficiently recognize that drag may have an independent significance for those involved. How does it connect to one’s identity? How does it connect to one’s sense of community? These questions are important, independent of whether the drag is subversive or reactionary. Yet these issues are of little concern to hooks. As a consequence, it seems to me that she eliminates the possibility of a distinctive subject-position (or rather, set of subject-positions) articulated in the ball culture that cannot be reduced to her own framework.

To some extent, hooks may be guilty of ‘selective targeting’ (‘hunting down the vulnerable’). She is concerned about the sexism and internalized racism inherent in drag ball culture. To what extent, however, does this actually turn out to be a further attack on the gender-vulnerable?

Finally (and connected to hooks’ erasure of the subjectivity of the folks involved in the drag balls), she doesn’t see a distinct form of oppression other than (1) sex; (2) race; and possibly (to a less extent) (3) orientation. In other words, she doesn’t recognize the possibility of oppression of transsexuals, drag queens, and other gender variants as something that cannot be fully reduced to the oppression of “females.”    

Judith Butler : “Critically Queer” and a critique by Viviane Namaste (“Tragic Misreadings”).

It is impossible to truly understand the emergence of transgender politics and transgender studies in the early nineties without grasping the importance of the theory of Judith Butler in her books Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter (199?). In what follows I sketch out some of her main ideas on ‘peformativity’ and ‘citation’ and the relationship of these ideas to her understanding of the film Paris is Burning. The article by Namaste points to the inherent tensions between Butlerian queer theory and trans theory and politics.

(1)         In a radical departure from the second-wave feminism of Raymond, Butler does not allow for the existence of males and females prior to culture, where females are oppressed through the imposition of gender roles. Instead, the distinction between gender and sex is bogus – sex itself is “socially constructed.” By this Butler means that sex is always conceptualized in terms of some framework or theory which assigns meanings and values to the body as sexed.

In class, I gave three arguments in favor of the view that sex is socially constructed. First, if we grant that human sexes do not break down distinctly in two well-defined sexes (since there are various features – karyotype, genitalia, gonad, etc. – and various degrees and formations of these features) we must conclude that any sharp division is of human invention. This is underscored by the use of surgery to “enforce” this bogus dualism. Second, if human sex is fundamentally understood in a way that involves values and norms (e.g. a female body is supposed to look . . . ) then it is socially constructed, since values and norms are invented by human beings. Finally, if human sex is fundamentally understood in a way that is blended with conceptions of race, then (since race is socially constructed), it is socially constructed.

(2)         Likewise, Butler does not believe that selves exist prior to gender. In Raymond’s view, by contrast, there are selves that are then colonized or brain-washed through social gender roles: The goal is to eliminate these roles. For Butler, the self cannot be understood apart from “gendering.” A self is always already gendered, just as (for Haraway) we are always already cyborgs.

Important Political Note: If sexed bodies and selves are socially-constructed, then it is hard to speak of women (or females) as oppressed by society. In Butler’s view women (females) are effectively created through culture. Thus, there are no women (or females) prior to culture. Like Haraway’s, Butler’s model of resistance rejects so prior view of innocence. 

(3)         Butler is often MISunderstood as arguing that gender is nothing but a performance (like drag). However, this model presuppose that there is a self or agent prior to gender who then “dons the clothing” and acts in the appropriate ways. But Butler’s point is that there is no self prior to gender performance. Rather, the gendered self comes into existence precisely through repeated gender performance.

In other words, according to Butler: Gender is performative. Here, she borrows J.L Austin’s notion of a ‘performative’.  For example, in saying “I promise to call you tomorrow”, the very naming of what I am doing brings the promise into existence. Likewise, gender performance brings about the existence of a self (or rather the illusion thereof) into existence. This is accomplished through repetition.

Through repeated gender behavior over a period of time, the illusion of a

uniform, pre-existing gendered ego or psychic core is created as the

“source” of the gender behavior. Far from the “source”, however, this

gendered ego is nothing but the illusory effect of the repetition.

(4)   Butler appeals to the notion of citation in order to explain how words (like queer) as well as gender performance are constrained by the past and yet are still open to partial re-signification and contestation. For example, while queer has a long history of derogatory usage, it has been ‘re-appropriated’ and used in a politically liberatory way.

Butler takes up Nietzsche’s notion of a ‘sign-chain.’  This requires viewing words in a historical way (words have a history, they are used in different ways at different times). In Nietzsche’s view, there is considerable latitude in new interpretations and uses of past signs (indeed, there are no real constraints at all).

For Butler, by contrast, future uses of words are constrained by past uses. This constraint is not powerful enough to prevent changes in meaning, however. Drawing on Derrida, Butler argues that the meaning of words depends upon a citation of the past uses as the norm. For example, while queer takes on a new meaning, it takes on this meaning precisely through citing the past derogatory uses.

               According to Butler, gender performance works the same way. Through gender  performance "the agent" cites gender norms, and through this depends

                upon the authority of the past. Yet this also opens up the possibility of subversive, re-signifying gender presentation. Queer drag, for Butler, makes explicit

                (through exaggeration) the way in which all gender is merely imitative and non-natural. Queer drag, like the word queer, can draw on the past and yet

                open up new resistant significations.

        (5) According to Butler, Paris is Burning is complex - a demonstration of ambivalence between reactionary and subversive performances of drag. It is

              subversive, for Butler, to the extent that it shows up the way in which all gender is imitative in nature.

Viviane Namaste “Tragic Misreadings”

Namaste’s article brings out the important tension between (Butlerian) queer theory and trans studies and politics. She makes three related considerations of Butler’s work:

(1)   Butler uses transgender people (like drag queens and transsexuals) as tropes and as “discursive levers” in order to advance a particular theoretical agenda. This is like the criticism Towle and Morgan offer of transgender political uses of third gender and the transgender native. It involves objectification and “othering” in order to harness lives and realities of “others” for the purposes of one’s own political or theoretical agenda.

For example, Namaste complains that Butler uses the death of Venus Xtravaganza as a kind of allegory about what happens when one “misreads the map of power.” In this way, Butler seems to overlook the fact that Xtravanganza’s death happens largely because she is a transsexual prostitute. Rather than pointing to the realities which confront trans people, Namaste argues, Butler uses trans people as examples to make theoretical points.

(2)   Butler’s work is basically too general. In pointing to the subversive potential of drag, Butler ignores the actual social conditions in which gay male drag occurs as well as the ways in which it is regulated. For example, she fails to note ways in which some gay bars restrict drag performance to the stage, disallow transsexual and non-trans women entrance, etc. Thus, Butler’s account of drag is a theoretical idealization.

(3)   Butler, while drawing on the post-structuralist work of Foucault and Derrida fails to be post-structuralist enough. A good post-structuralist would care about the details that Butler ignores above (see point (2)). Instead, Butler takes the notion of drag out of particular social contexts and then tries to draw theoretical lessons from it. This is to take precisely the sort of stance critiques by Foucault and Derrida (according to Namaste).