Butler and Paris is Burning

Paris is Burning is a documentary that follows the circle of “balls” or the gay community in New York. These “balls” are events where the members of the gay community will dress up in various outfits and costumes in what they consider their identity and express their “fantasy of being a superstar” or “being a runway on a model.” The ball is a way for the participants to express themselves in any way, and as one of the drag queens says, “In a ball, you can be anything you want” in any way shape or form you want, within the various different categories that are offered to compete in. It provides a total freedom of expression for the participants and a way for them to not just put on a show, but express their self-proclaimed identity. Although the contestants do have a desire to win the prizes and relative fame from being selected as a winner at the ball, but all of the contestants express their interest in the ball not in a competitive spirit but in the simple joy it brings them.

            The most interesting aspect for me was not the balls themselves, but rather the subcategories the participants divided themselves into, called “houses,” and particularly, the “mother” concept of each house. I feel like this is a direct application of the performative nature of gender, as described by Judith Butler.  Butler differentiates between sex and gender, where sex is the biological facts of one’s existence, and gender identity is “is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo.” When gender is performative, we mean that it is not something given at birth, but something institutionally committed to a person not just be society, but by one’s acts within it. One performs their gender through “the stylization of the body… as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.”

In Paris is Burning, we are shown the lives of various individuals who in many different ways perform different gender identities. In the balls, the contestants are eventually split up into “houses” with each house having its own “mother.”  Interestingly, the crossdressers not only switch their gender-identity by simply dressing, acting, and behaving like they believe a woman to act, but also perform the gender identity of a mother. Not only do they act as society perceives a woman to act, but as society perceives the way a women in a certain, specialized situation, that they normally would have no access to, would act and be considered as “mothers.” Also, how even though each individual was performing a gender that was not their biological sex, they each took the role of a socially accepted family member within the houses. In each house, they were performing completely what society says the family should be. Another scene that was particularly interesting to me in this regard was the scene where the man in the dance studio was teaching the girls how to walk on the runway and “inject more femininity back in them.” It seemed very peculiar to me that this man would have to act in a way to re-established the performative nature of one’s gender identity to one that is not his own, in order form them to use this femininity as a tool for their own advantage against men.

Overall, Paris is Burning was a very opening experience for me to experience a culture I knew existed, but never knew to what degree. In conjunction with the Butler reading, however, it raised one for me. Just because their biology sex and gender didn’t match, if gender is just performative, do they necessarily have to switch completely to the other gender in a way that seems hyperbolic? It seems like if gender is dictated by societal norms, but at the same time performative, they could act in a way that is not so stereotypical of the gender but rather in a way that seems to be more personal to each individual, while still expressing their gender.