Paris is Burning

This week I watched the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning. The movie explores the New York City ball scene in the 1980s. It focuses on African American gay, transgender, and drag culture involved in the balls and the outsiders’ society the have built for themselves.

            Balls function sort of like pageants. Contestants compete in different categories and walk like runway models, they are scored by a panel of judges and the winners receive trophies. Categories include butch queen, societal tropes like schoolgirl and business executive which are both realness categories. To me, the realness competitions were most compelling. In these categories contestants were graded on their ability to blend in with heterosexual male culture or heterosexual female culture. This category shows the walker’s ability to appear as what society wants them to be, and is just a heightening of the gender roles convention demands they perform. So, in a way this category can be the complete commitment to the gendered demands of our culture.

            But this category can also be among the most fantastical. Contestants dress relatively conservatively, they become the people that lack of social standing and opportunity have barred them from becoming. Although throughout the movie we hear repeatedly of a desire for wealth and luxury to the point of excess, in the end we realize almost everyone encountered in this film is really striving for some form of normality. Those members of gay and transsexual culture rejected by their families grouped themselves into houses that function as families that love and care for one another. Near the end of the film, several of the main subjects express a deep-seated wish to get married to live a normal and content lives. This longing for normalcy really seems to stem from a need for acceptance and understanding. Wealth and fame, the two most commonly stated aspirations, are really just tangible manifestations of societal acceptance.

            The Butler essay we all read for this week outlines gender as a historical construction reinforced by the repetition of a societal performance. Within Paris is Burning and the larger transsexual and drag culture, gender is quite literally a performance. Those in the movie are painfully aware of the repercussions of displaying a gender identity that falls outside of the heteronormative. That the realness ball contest category is so broad and so popular makes it clear that society has taught and encouraged the performance of gender identity as separate from one’s true gender. Butler says that gender cannot really be apparent, true, or false. But the fact “that culture so readily punishes or marginalizes those who fail to perform the illusion of gender essentialism should be sign enough that on some level there is social knowledge that the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically necessitated.” Despite its seeming triviality, the fulfilling of gender roles is key to societal acceptance. Interestingly, ball culture defies the notion of gendering by exaggerating and perfecting gender performance.

            Even though ball culture is arguably the class most negatively by today’s ideas of gender, they are also the most free from the trappings of gender roles. Those content within their socially acceptable gendering are unable to see that gender is a false construction. And because they cannot see that gender essentialism has ontological truth, they are the most trapped within its conventions. They will continue to believe that the outward performance of their gender is essential to their self.

            The people in this film do not identify as traditionally male and female, and as such, there is no way for them to truly perform their gender. The absence of a language, spoken or visual, to explain their gender has resulted in the creation of unique forms of expression, all of which are on show at the balls. The most prominent example is a form of dancing called voguing.           

            This documentary was very interesting because it took place within a culture that is part of our culture and completely alienated from it. They have both an insider’s and outsider’s perspective. This perspective provides an understanding of how ingrained gendering is in our society and the kind of crises it creates.