Opengender

In Livingstone's (1988/9) documentary Paris is Burning, Latino gay male-to-female transvestites and transsexuals seek a chimerical cultural 'authenticity' by re-circulating cultural codes of dominance in a queer context. These black gay performers also mimic normalising codes of 'blackness,' foregrounding the mutually productive relation of these codes to the sex-gender system. They are, perhaps, most unsettling to identifications of gender and race when their mimicry achieves maximum 'realness.' It seems worth noting that 'realness' is defined by the performers as a mimicry of heterosexual identities by a homosexual person so seamlessly carried off as to enable the performer to "get home with no blood on her." [as defined by Venus Xtravaganza in Paris is BurningThus 'realness' is articulated not by reference to idealised constructs of sex-gender, but to the violence which borders their world, re-fixing the limits of fantasy transformation.

Livingstone's own context is that of a Jewish American lesbian with an ivy-league education. Her film, and the 'high-art' media culture which commercialised and consumed it, was criticised for an appropriative attitude towards black cultural forms. Hooks (1992) argued that "Livingstone approaches her subject matter as an outsider looking in" (151) and asked why it was that "whites [could] so outspokenly make their pleasure in this film heard and the many black viewers who express discontent [...] [have] not named their displeasure publicly?" (153). Butler agreed that "the ethnographic conceit of a neutral gaze will always be a white gaze, an unmarked white gaze, which passes its own perspective off as the omniscient" (136). Unless sufficient 'ambivalence' is opened out in the performances themselves, the audience will effectively "absent itself" from the process of taking its fetishised pleasure. On the whole, Butler did not read such ambivalence in the 'children's' performances. The case that the film naively reproduces a conventional use of ethnographic documentary form is perhaps overstated, however. Livingstone's film is strongly marked by a parody of this form which re-refers (white, middle-class?) spectators' interpretations to a postmodern re-articulation of urban-ethnography. That is, it is marked by a textually deconstructive mode of high-cultural practice — access to which is hardly less privileged, nevertheless. The culturally and economically privileged location of the film's enunciative mode thus appears to remain more or less untroubled by its self-ironising, post-modern, style.

Butler argued that she has been misunderstood as implying that cross-dressed performance is necessarily subversive and that a purely discursive approach may idealise both 'power' and 'resistance.' "[T]he rearticulation of kinship in Paris is Burning might be understood as repetitions of hegemonic forms of power which fail to repeat loyally and, in that failure, open possibilities for resignifying the terms of violation against their violating aims" (Butler, 1993: 124). But there are, of course, forms of drag which heterosexuality produces for its own consumption such as cross-dressing in popular comedy (see Russo, 1981; Kuhn, 1985; Straayer, 1992). Drag is thus an ambivalent form which may also 'reidealize' heterosexual gender-norms (Butler, 1993: 124).

As much as there is defiance and affirmation, the creation of kinship and of glory in that film, there is also the kind of reiteration of norms which cannot be called subversive, but which lead to the death of Venus Xtravaganza [...] To what set of interpellating calls does Venus Xtravaganza respond, and how is the reiteration of the law to be read in the manner of her response? (Butler, 1993: 125)

Butler saw the performances at the balls in Paris is Burning as motivated by phantasy rather than political strategy (though some might feel this boundary is itself hard to establish!). She noted that "feminizing" configurations in the gender hegemony precede 'The Children's' reiterations of them. 'The Children's' aspirational fantasy merely fails, in Butler's terms, to "displace" such norms (133).

For hooks, black male drag performances do articulate a positive resistance to the compulsion to enact black masculinity as "hyper-phallic:"

Many heterosexual black men in white supremacist patriarchal culture have acted as though the primary "evil" of racism has been the refusal of the dominant culture to allow them full access to patriarchal power, so that in sexist terms they are compelled to inhabit a sphere of powerlessness, deemed 'feminine,' hence they have perceived themselves as emasculated. To the extent that black men accept a white supremacist sexist representation of themselves as castrated, without phallic power, and therefore pseudo-females, they will need to overly assert a phallic misogynist masculinity [...] For black males to take appearing in drag seriously, be they gay or straight, is to oppose a heterosexist representation of black manhood. (hooks, 1992: 147)

Hooks (1992) nevertheless read of a loss of "memory and location" in the children's performances; and a resignification of black resistances for white audiences in Livingstone's film:

What viewers witness is not black men longing to impersonate or even become like 'real' black women but their obsession with an idealized fetishized vision of femininity that is white. (148)

What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now and make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited, black folks are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power, and pleasure. (149)

Hooks' comments make (working-class) black femininity appear as 'real,' whilst the yoking of white femininity to privileged class locations in 'The Children's' performances renders it as pure idealisation. For Butler:

[I]t would not be enough to claim that for Venus Xtravaganza gender is marked by race and class, for gender is not the substance or primary substrate and race and class the qualifying attributes. In this instance, gender is the vehicle for the phantasmatic transformation of that nexus of race and class, the site of its articulation. (Butler, 1993: 130 - emphasis hers)

Venus Xtravaganza seeks "a certain transubstantiation of gender in order to find an imaginary man who will designate a class and race privilege that promises a permanent shelter from racism, homophobia, and poverty" (Butler, 1993: 130). But for Butler, 'The Children's' idealising narrativisation and envious mimicry of forms of black femininity also effect "a full-scale phantasmatic transfiguration not only of the plight of poor black and Latino gay men, but of poor black women and Latinas, who are the figures for the abjection that the drag ball scene elevates as a site of idealized identification" (Butler, 1993: 133) — an "idealization which of course works to deny the situation of the great numbers of poor black women [...]" (132). However, 'The Children' themselves originate (and were displaced) from the same working-class, subaltern context as the heterosexual black women whom they parody and who hardly seem poorer or more oppressed than the culturally displaced and economically destitute 'Children' themselves.

Radical feminism characterised M-F drag practices as (undifferentiatedly) appropriative towards an (undifferentiated) category of femininity. M-F performativity thus universally figured as an oppressive 'colonisation' of femininity (Raymond, 1980). Butler (1993) rejected this model as homophobic since it effectively reinscribed heterosexual relations at the heart of homosexuality (127). Butler seemed to be suggesting, instead, that it is not the (undecidable) performativity of drag in itself, but the re-idealisation of (all) femininities effected by the aspirational mode of 'The Children's' performativity which occludes (all) women's oppression in this instance. But Hooks seemed primarily concerned that it is white rather than black femininity which 'The Children' aspire to (their mimicry of local women, indeed, seems more affectionately satirical in tone). Butler's argument thus seems primarily concerned with competing narrativisations of power relations between heterosexual women and homosexual men in (white) queer and feminist discourses. But the implications of this performative imbrication of gender/race/sex discourses may very well prove undecidable in terms of a discursive model without reference to specific locations.

Goldsby (1993) stressed that readings of Paris is Burning needed to be re-situated in an analysis of the materiality of the power-relations amongst which it was produced:

The ball world recycles commodity culture, much as rap music samples from the musical gene pool. In their respective recombinations, both insist upon a sense and system of referentiality that mitigates the ahistoricism of much poststructuralist aesthetic theory. As we ask of rap, What is that riff — who performed it first, and when? so we should ask of the balls, Who is that personality; what are its social origins; [..] [and] what does it mean that the ball never ends [...] It means that Madonna can convert vogueing into excess [...] into a cultural cash crop, banking on the ball world's invisibility and its inability to publicly claim vogueing as its own. (Goldsby, 1993: 111-112)

Butler argued that Venus Xtravaganza "misread the map" of the locations which permit the relatively masculinised Willi Ninja to translate his performance remuneratively to the mainstream context cited by Goldsby. But on what grounds is Venus Xtravaganza's reading held to be inferior in its accuracy? In its divergence from the historicised memory (discursive map) of (white, middle-class) feminists? For Butler, even white heterosexual (middle-class) women's performance of white femininity is inevitably destined for 'disappointment,' since discursive ideals do not make themselves available to perfect renditions. In terms of Butler's own account of materiality, however, heterosexual identifications, materialised through relatively consistent reiterations of its ideal gender-types, must surely effect privilege and are quite unambiguously complicit with power even if inevitably not fully realising its ideal types. 'The Children's' performative idealisations of white femininity may not 'ring true' to a (white, middle-class) feminist historical 'memory' of the nitty gritty of female oppression but, according to Hooks' reading, 'The Children' are by no means in error as to the mode of power's deployment in the fields of class and race:

The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself — its way of life — as the only meaningful life there is. (149 – emphasis mine)

It is, then, 'The Children's' complicit strategy rather than their reading of modes of oppression with which hooks took issue.

For Butler, both the limit and confirmation of Venus Xtravaganza's 'realness' as feminine are articulated by male violence and Butler argued that she would have achieved 'transubstantiation' of her poverty more easily by 'doing' masculinity instead. It is thus on this specific terrain of gender that she is argued to have "misread the map."

. . . Willi Ninja can pass as straight; [...] it is [...] no accident that Willi Ninja ascends and Venus Xtravaganza dies. (Butler, 1993: 130)

However, this generalising statement does not seem fully to take into account the specificities of the material locations at which Willi Ninja's performance of masculinity was effected and assimilated.

Masculinised forms of homosexuality seem, indeed, more assimilable to the materialisation of (male) authority in white, heterosexual professional institutions (such as universities) insofar as they effect some denial of a 'feminising' homosexual identification figured as inversion. In other words, homosexual masculinity is a performance which is 'truer' to the (authoritative) norm than that of a drag queen and is thus able to 'pass.' In the context of popular culture, it would seem to be the figure of the effeminate homosexual which is generally more assimilable for circulation and consumption — that is, for the purposes of a (feminising) commodification:

Camp also exerts a unique appeal in popular music [...] Music video, a performative form that, by its very nature, exposes identities as necessary fictions, is already imbued with camp. (Drukman, 1995: 88)

Willi Ninja is, after all, hardly being invited to run the BBC or lecture in post-colonial studies. In any other context but that of 'The Children's' excesses (such as, say, a university), Willi Ninja's performance of masculinity would actually register as highly effeminate. It also seems worth noting, apropos passing, that Venus Xtravaganza's much lighter complexion signifies in her aspiration to transform her abjected identity and pass as (feminine) and white. Willi Ninja, on the other hand, could not pass as white.

A 'post-feminist' heterosexual femininity, moreover, may not attempt a 'true' representation of femininity. Female stars, in particular, may foreground the fetishisation of femininity in its production as spectacle (as in Madonna's mode of performativity). The availability of Willi Ninja's performance for commodification is clearly not, in this context, predicated on any kind of mimesis of (authoritative) heterosexual (white) masculinity. Willi Ninja's queer performance of an ambiguous black sexuality seems to materialise the discursive production of ambiguities in the contradictory 'feminising' and 'hyper-virilising' coding of black masculinity. The foregrounding of these inconsistencies renders Willi Ninja's body commodifiable as postmodern art(ifice). Willi Ninja, in fact, makes no discernible effort to pass as heterosexual. Venus Xtravaganza's mimesis of an idealised white femininity is, on the other hand, all too 'true.' Her feminine masquerade is disrupted only by the physical literality of her covert possession of 'the phallus' and by her ethnicity which signify as the contradictory 'truth' of her body, troubling her mimesis of white femininity and resignifying her performance as pathos "by a certain failure to pass completely" (129). In effect, she is just not playing the (postmodern) game. Willi Ninja's comlex ambiguity, on the other hand, offers a perfect post-modern commodity.

Hooks (1992) went on to assess Madonna's complicity with racist constructions of black masculinity in her crotch-grabbing, postmodern, pop performance:

She [Madonna] longs to assert phallic power, and like every other group in this white supremacist society, she clearly sees black men as embodying a quality of maleness that eludes white men. Hence, they are often the group of men she most seeks to imitate, taunting white males with her own version of 'black masculinity.' When it comes to entertainment rivals, Madonna clearly perceives black male stars like Prince and Michael Jackson to be the standard against which she must measure herself and that she ultimately hopes to transcend. (hooks, 1992: 161)

These two stars referred to as epitomising this racialised, sexist, hyper-virilised representation of black masculinity are also cited by Terence Trent D'Arblay (Garber, 1992: 274) as, on the contrary, epitomising the feminisation (emasculation) mapped over light-complexion (via the association of feminine-desirability with whiteness) which D'Arblay argued to be a precondition of crossover success for African-American male pop stars. What has rendered these accounts of the gender-coding of the black male performers so contradictory here? That the one critique articulates a black, heterosexual male enunciative position and the other a black, heterosexual, female one? Or does it merely cite the ambiguities inherent to the discursive production of black masculinity?

In discursive terms, any mode of counter-identification (indeed any discursive formation at all) is inevitably incoherent and contradictory. It is not so much the consistency of Willi Ninja's performance with an idealised (unified) masculinity as a particular configuration of discursively produced ambiguities at a particular location which makes Willi Ninja available, as a figure, to Madonna's mode of performativity. This figure is strategically appropriated to counterpoint the production of Madonna's post(modern)feminist masquerade - by highlighting its artifice (as well as its whiteness). What renders the performances in Paris is Burning politically ambivalent for hooks is the "racialized fictional construction of the 'feminine' that suddenly makes the representation of whiteness as crucial to the experience of female impersonation as gender [...] a sexist idealization of white womanhood" (hooks, 1992: 147). The inconsistent recirculation of codings of fetishised black hyper-virility along with an equally fetishised white femininity foregrounds the formerly covert strategy of the (white) feminine masquerade in Madonna's performance. It is this ironic foregrounding of a formerly covert female appropriation of the phallus which signifies Madonna's performance as 'post-feminist.' The enhancement of this technique, by associating it with Willi Ninja's dark complexion and gender-ambiguous performance, might very well 'come undone' if it had been counterpointed, instead, to Venus Xtravaganza's light complexion and hyper(phallic)feminine masquerade.

The production and reproduction of sex-gender coding is strongly inflected by the multiplicity of inter-textual locations of repeatable performance and cannot be assigned 'correct' or 'incorrect' readings.