Tutorial notes and questions for Judith Butler online reading ‘Gender is Burning’

What Paris is Burning suggests … is that the order of sexual difference is not prior to that of race or class in the constitution of the subject; indeed, that the symbolic is also and at once a racializing set of norms, and that norms of realness by which the subject is produced are racially informed conceptions of “sex”…(130)

Background:

We’re already familiar with Althusser’s notion of interpellation – the formative process through which individuals are hailed (as with the policeman’s “Hey you!”) as subjects of the law. Butler begins her analysis with this process, which simultaneously confers social recognition and fear of punishment on the individual, wondering about other forms of address and relationship to the law which ‘disarticulate the power of punishment from the power of recognition.’ (122)

In addressing this question, she builds on her influential account of performativity in Gender Trouble (1990) as the process through which discourse produces that to which it refers. Eg. the wedding vow – it is when both parties utter “I do” that the marriage comes into legal being. The relationship of identification with our proper name is another example of the power of performativity. Our sense of ‘self’- as “John” or “Jemma” - is produced through the accumulated hailings of a lifetime – both affirmative and negative. But Butler still wants to argue for the possibility of individual agency and she argues that when we put the “I” – in quotation marks – we acknowledge that the self that resists is produced by existing power relations but is not entirely reducible to them. This constrained agency is a precondition for imagining a future in which power relations are different.

Gender is one of the most important ways that individuals are interpellated with social roles hierarchically organized through a distinction between masculine and feminine values and the assumption of “compulsory heterosexuality’. It is in this context that Butler’s chapter addresses the question of whether drag performances can be seen as an example of subversive agency against hegemonic values? Butler points to the importance of recognizing the different functions of drag performance within the hegemonic hetero-culture (eg. Some Like it Hot, Tootsie) and within a diverse range of homo-cultures. The question raised by Paris is Burning, Jennie Livingston’s documentary film about drag-balls in which African-American and Latino men perform white social norms of masculinity like “the executive” and the “Ivy League student” as well as Latino and African-American ideals of femininity and black street masculinity, raises the question of ‘whether parodying the dominant norms is enough to displace them; indeed, whether the denaturalization of gender cannot be the very vehicle for a reconsolidation of hegemonic norms.’ (125) In particular, Butler wants to understand the relationship between “realness”, as the standard against which the performers are judged, and the “ideals” that the most successful performers appear to be reinforcing by embodying so perfectly.

Critical conversations: Butler thinking about a film with and against bell hooks

A significant part of this reading consists of Butler’s response to black feminist theorist bell hooks’ review of Paris is Burning. She starts by disagreeing with hooks’ reading of gay male to female drag as misogyny. While this is consistent with a radical feminist tradition of critique of male to female trans-sexuality and cross-dressing, Butler identifies disturbing continuities with conservative responses to lesbianism. ‘According to these views, drag is nothing but the displacement and appropriation of “women”, and hence fundamentally based in a misogyny, a hatred of women; and lesbianism is nothing but the displacement and appropriation of men, and so fundamentally a matter of hating men – misandry.” She points out that love is always shadowed by rejection and hate in these readings of male-female drag and lesbianism and that rather than having to decide whether drag is all about women or not about women at all and whether lesbianism is all about men or not about men at all, it is more productive to see both drag and lesbianism as simultaneously implicated within misogyny and misandry and subversive of them.

Butler goes on to quote hooks extensively however as the latter produces a critique of the comparatively privileged white lesbian subject position (shared with Butler herself) from which Livingston constructs her representation of the drag ball and its participants.

Since [Livingston’s] presence as a white woman/lesbian filmmaker is “absent” from Paris is Burning, it is easy for viewers to imagine that they are watching an ethnographic film documenting the life of black gay “natives” and not recognize that they are watching a work shaped and formed from a perspective and standpoint specific to Livingston. By cinematically masking this reality (we hear her ask questions but never see her) Livingston does not oppose the way hegemonic whiteness “represents” blackness, but rather assumes an imperial overseeing position that is in no way progressive or counterhegemonic …

Too many critics and interviewers act as though she somehow did this marginalized black subculture a favour by bringing their experience to a wider public. Such a stance obscures the substantial rewards she has received for this work. Since so many of the black gay men in the film express the desire to be big stars, it is easy to place Livingston in the role of benefactor, offering these “poor black souls” a way to realize their dreams. (hooks in Butler, 134)

hooks also observes that Livingston portrays these men and their ‘houses’ of other performers as disconnected from their larger black and Latino communities, which, in turn, serves to enhance the sense of importance of the white film-maker’s role as star-broker. Butler builds on hooks’ critique to ask how Livingston’s visible deployment of the camera in the scene where she is shooting Octavia St Laurent unsettles the identity category of white lesbian itself, raising questions about the film-maker’s erotic desire towards a black male-female transsexual who “works perceptually as a woman … What would it mean to say that Octavia is Jennie Livingston’s kind of girl? …If this is the production of the black transsexual for an eroticising white gaze, is it not also the transsexualization of lesbian desire?(135)

Discussion questions.

The impossibility of reading [or seeing through the performance makes] the body performing and the ideal performed appear indistinguishable…

• Does this denaturalization of the norm succeed in subverting the norm, or is this a denaturalization in the service of a perpetual re-idealization, one that can only oppress, even as, or precisely when, it is embodied most effectively?

Livingston’s phallic deployment of the camera gives her ‘…the power to turn men into women who, then, depend on the power of her gaze to become and remain women.’

• What is the status of the desire to feminize black and Latino men that the film enacts?
• Does this not serve the purpose, among others, of a visual pacification of subjects by whom white women are imagined to be socially endangered?
• What does it mean to eroticise the holding out of that promise [to turn these men into women] when the film will do well but their lives will remain substantially unaltered?
• Is this not [the camera’s] own fantasy, one in which the filmmaker wields the power to transform what s/he records?