IS PARIS REALLY BURNING?

Essay about queer film theories related to Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990) and the drag queen/king

Paris Is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990) celebrates new-yorker African-American and Latino drag queens and transexuals lifestyles who attend voguing balls and competitions in categories during the 80’s and 90’s after the Culture War that questioned identity and race. Contreras defines voguing as “a dance that consists of a series of poses struck by the performer in campy imitation of a high fashion catwalk” (2004: 120). For him, this is one of the films of the New Queer Cinema that held the issues of queerness and race, besides it offered a meaningful context for the ‘voguing’ from the complexities of gender, class and race. This identity queries make the homo world imitate the hetero one but put into a performance of spectacle and sensationalism, with racial and class issues that marks its serious problems in the society. In the film, whites are shown as wealthy and glamorous which makes the perfect contrast with the dangerous lives of the performers who dealt with racism, crime and poverty in order to achieve the white fantasy.

hooks declares in ‘is Paris Burning?’ (1996) that women like to dress like boys in order to have the illusion of power, but then I wonder, what do men have by dressing up as women? She says that “to cross-dress as a woman in patriarchy was also to symbolically cross from the world of powerlessness into a world of privilege (...) following the psychoanalysis approach, “the last intimate, voyeuristic gesture” (1996:145). She criticised gay man drag performances as misogynistic. Butler as well ensures that “drag is nothing but the displacement and appropriation of ‘women’ and hence fundamentally based in misogyny” (1993:87) but this would come from an homophobic approach of feminism. She says that drag is not related to the ridicule or denaturalisation or appreciation of women, but a destabilisation of gender, the path to break the normative and sexual oppressions. For me, the drag performance is not misogynist, instead it is a liberation. Unlike women, men were not allowed to wear dresses, heels or long wigs: the drag performances sets them free to worship the woman fashion, to imitate it and to become a part of it by both, exploring the world and themselves as form of self-identity recognition. But, as Butler points in ‘Gender is Burning’, drag performances have not necessary relation with subversion as it may well be “used in the service of both, denaturalisation and re-idealisation of hyperbolic gender norms” (1993: 85).

In the white world of hetero-patriarchy, to be dressed as a woman is seen as a refusal of your power as a man and an entrance into the world of powerlessness. Nevertheless, black men were always seen as “pseudo-females”, as hooks says. They were powerless in front of white supremacy, as we can clearly see in Pressure (1976), castrated by the white supremacy: they were seen, just like females: second class citizens, with the lack of the phallic power. Hence, there comes homophobia within the blacks, they refuse all kind of femininity and that also means gay man. The problem for hooks in Paris Is Burning (1990) is that those black men where showed in balls portraying white beauty and fashion, away from black women’s one. Therefore, the normative femininity is that of the white and straight women from the upper class, the kind of beauty that appears in Vogue and other fashion magazines. hooks points out Canby saying that “queens knock themselves out to imitate the members of a society that will not have them” (1996: 150). They seek what they call ‘realness’, determined by class and race, in order to go into the society and pass as an heteronormative white person, but this is everything a facade, as we can appreciate in Venus Extravaganza’s dream. These dreams are always the same, and for hooks, they are retrograde and antifeminist. She wants to be “an spoiled white girl living in the suburbs that will marry a wealth man” but the society will never let her have that, even if she’s (as she says) a “whole woman”. She’s seen as a freak and mutilated to death for that, she’s only a fantasy to play with and nothing else, just like all the others. For Contreras, the wish to be white implies the wish of not being poor and stardom is what will make that fulfilment to end up with poverty and racism. This cultural structure is ruled by the imperial ruling-class as the patriarchal white world is presented as the only meaningful lifestyle. Conversely, for Champagne, this is just a symbolic of the social order, this ambiguity is what makes the drag world as ideal, with a fetishised and sexist version of femininity, and that is exactly what Livingstone critiques and celebrates.

I mostly disagree with hooks’ view about queer theory approach, but in ‘is Paris burning?’ she says that “the abstinence by the white lesbian filmmaker (Livingston) is that that makes the audience position as a viewer of an ethnographic documentary of black gay” (1996: 220). Nevertheless, for me, is actually the presence of Livingston in the film what makes it look like an ethnographic documentary. For Doty, the only possible way of doing ‘queer’ cinema is though non-mainstream productions, and documentary is part of it as Contreras introduces us: “Julien and Riggs presented in their films new forms of queer visibility and narrative by mixing documentary, history and testimony to present less coherent or linear perspectives” (2004:120) . On the Figure 1, we can appreciate Jennie Livingston framed inside a green curtain and hidden behind the light in Dorian Corey’s make up room, and I’m almost sure this was intentional. Here, we appreciate her as an outsider, she’s seen hiding while we listen to Dorian and with the cat on the first place. She’s not seeking for prominence, but we can clearly see her with her perfect blond hair, white skin and trendy glasses asking questions from the dark. As far as I’m concerned, this is just a way (as it is shown almost at the end of the piece) to sign her work “I’m the one who has been asking questions, and this film is mine” just as we have seen many directors (Hitchcock or Tarantino for example) do through time so they can be part of their own creation. Anyway, for Butler, that Livingston is always hidden (now we see that not only with her voice) reflects an imperial overseeing position: she holds the hegemonic whiteness that in this film represents blackness, she represents what the black men of this piece want to achieve (even though she’s a lesbian). The shape of the documentarist piece is worked through the film to make it look like she’s a hero by telling the story, but maybe she is instead, telling the story she wants by using them as subjects. And this is why for hooks the film is shown as an spectacle for the viewer, amazed by the culture and the posing performance, but she has no interest in the real life of the protagonists.

After everything that has been put in consideration on this essay, and talking about queerness I suggest a new point of view inside Queer Theories. Lesbians and gays have been put out of the Queer New Wave as Alexander Doty says in his Queer Theory. The term ‘queer’ is used to “describe the intersection or combination of more than one established “non-straight” sexuality or gender position in a spectator, text or personality” (1998:149). Hence, “the ‘queer’ world would be reserved for those (...) that articulate spaces outside gender binaries and sexuality categories” (1998: 150), which means that there’s a need of more than one subversion of the self to be considered queer. Butler ensures that the norm fails to determine us completely so binarism is never accomplished because gender is just a performance society convenes in norms and no one identifies completely with a gender, they just follow the rules. Then, would it be queer the fact that post-butch era of lesbianism (where lesbians were seen as entirely masculine women) some lesbians forced themselves, just as drag queens did in their time, to become the most feminine part of themselves (eliminating all the other parts), succumbing to the performance to eradicate the butch belief? In this case, they would be taking that upper class white and straight women’s fashion and rituals to accomplish the lack of masculinity under everyone else’s gaze to finally achieve the ‘realness’.

“One can only learn to love the self

when one breaks through illusion and

faces reality, not by escaping into fantasy”

-Dorian Corey

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Butler, Judith (1993): ‘Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and

Subversion’, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge)

(pp. 121–40)

Butler Judith (1993): ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in The Lesbian and

Gay Studies Reader, ed. by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin

(New York; London: Routledge) (pp. 307-318)

Butler, Judith (1993): ‘The Critically Queer’ in Bodies That Matter: On the

Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge) (pp. 169-185)

Contreras, Daniel T. (2004): ‘New Queer Cinema: Spectacle, Race, Utopia’, in

Michele Aaron, ed. New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press) (pp. 119-127)

Doty, Alexander (1998): ‘Queer Theory,’ in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, ed.

John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University Press) (pp. 148-153)

hooks, bell (1996): ‘is Paris burning?’, in Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the

Movies (London: Routledge) (pp. 215-226)

FILMOGRAPHY

Livingston, Jennie (1990): Paris is Burning (source YouTube: https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xrwoYSNFbg )

Murphy, Ryan (2018): Pose (series)

Ové, Horace (1976): Pressure