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.

Self-Identity in Gender

Paris is Burning (1990) is a documentary capturing the lives of many drag queens, mostly through their “balls” which are, in a way, celebrations of their sexuality. Butler states that “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity, instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.” This of course separates gender from sex. Whereas gender would simply be fitting to a mold of expectation, sex is the physical aspect to being a male or female. Because I believe Butler would refer to the drag queens as women, I will refer to them as such. For most of the “girls” in the film, the performance of being a woman makes them a woman, and only a few of them take the step to actually have a sex change. For the rest, gender is an experience, just the same as race and class. Throughout the balls, they don’t only play the part of women; they play straight men and often white businessmen.

This all comes down to being accepted in society. While they are drag queens, most of them are black and of a lower socioeconomic status. While race is much harder to hide, which many of them still do, they play this life of riches and glamour, but really they are stealing their food and clothes because they can hardly afford to get by. This leads them to want the life they are acting. All of them want fame and money and many want a sex change. They want all of these things because they want to be looked up at instead of down, which is how they have lived their lives thus far. They are accustomed to scraping by and verbally arguing with those who don’t understand their way of life. The families that they create give them a sense of true family since many of them have been disowned.

While many strive to become a true female, one of the drag mothers, Pepper, points out how she believes getting a sex change is too far. She argues that the girls believe if they get a sex change they will be treated so much better, but women aren’t really treated great to begin with. This really shows when we first hear that Venus was murdered. She was working as an escort of sorts and was strangled. The act of the gender role has consequences either way, in this case the consequence being death. This is of course an exaggerated case, but women do face social and political consequences on a daily basis. Because the drag queens are either gay or transsexual, black, and likely poor, they must figure that no consequences can be worse than the ones they have faced. One of the queens that did get a sex change feels very free, yet her friend points out that the voice is still there, implying she still sounds like a man. This will likely lead to discrimination in her future seeing as transsexual men who undergo sex changes are treated very much differently than women are.

While identity is obviously a question of gender, the becoming of a woman is more of the experience than being a woman. This may be why Pepper will never have a sex change. She claims to have lived a wonderful life; this includes her previous life as a man and the self-realization that the role in life she wants to play is of a woman. To her, getting a sex change is taking that role too far, and in a way wipes that part of one’s identity from them. Many of the queens only go as far as getting breast implants and plastic surgery, adding to their identity and their personal process of becoming a woman, but taking away a part of your body is different. While the woman who underwent the sex change mentioned above literally gave up her penis for the act of gender, she still has the same body, and voice, as she did when she was still a male. Basically Pepper may be arguing that the penis is just one of the parts of the identity that will always remind one of their past as a man, so why cut it off unless you can literally get a new body… a female body.

Overall, the film raises some interesting questions about identity, of course relating to gender and sexuality. Gender in many ways is like playing a part in a movie. Often actors do play characters of opposite genders and are criticized. While it is an act, what is most true and often unclassifiable as far as gender is concerned, is the self-identity and the physical body. The rest is playing a role, molded by history and praised in a society where heterosexual reproduction is necessary. 

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.