Gender: Appropriation/Subversion

Judith Butler explores gender identity in "Gender is Burning," specifically through Jennie Livingston's film Paris is Burning. Butler asserts that gender is both formative and performative because it initiates the individual into a subjected status. Butler sees lesbians and black woman as comparable gender identities based on the their subjection and status in culture. Althusser conjectures that gender identity is a "unilateral act, as power of law to compel fear at the same time that it offers recognition at an expense"(Kocur, and Leung 167). Because of this power struggle in gender identity, Butler refines the notion of drag culture to include any type of "simultaneous production and subjugation of of subjects in culture which appears to arrange always and in every way for the annihilation of queers"(Kocur, and Leung 169).

In the film Paris is Burning, African American and Latino men attend drag balls in Harlem and compete in a variety of categories to challenge social norms. In these contests, realness is the "ability to compel belief and produce a naturalized effect" (Kocur, and Leung 172). This pageantry exposes norms that regulate realness as themselves phantasmically instituted and sustained (Kocur, and Leung 173). The pageantry of the drag ball is a fantasy, allowing the subject to live out various gender identities with more acceptable social implications and greater personal power. The subject can assume idealized roles with the desired sexed integrity of masculinity or femininity. A focus of the film is the character Venus Xtravaganza who desires to be a "whole" woman. Comparably, the contestants' daily lives outside of the ball are the painful reality.

In a society where things that are different are feared, what is the consequence of being yourself? What defines a person? With so many variations in sexuality and personality, who is really the authority on what is "superior?"

Kocur, Zoya, and Simon Leung. Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 166-80.