Read Along

Two weeks ago, we watched the documentary Paris is Burning (from here on known as PIB) and read some commentary related to the film. You can watch the film on youtube in 11 parts. The accompanying materials are bell hooks's "Is Paris Burning" and Judith Butler's "Gender is Burning: Questions of appropriation and Subversion." I'm going to run this entry a bit differntly, and have you read along with me as I try to decipher Butler's essay. I read the article for class, but I don't understand it, so here is my semi-annotated commentary.

She opens with two epigraphs, one from Louis Althusser, and one from Nietzsche. Niet is the existential atheist, right? Let's do some research. From wikipedia on Althusser:

Althusser's theory of ideology, as well as Marx, draws on Freud's and Lacan's concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively, and describes the structures and systems that enable the concept of the self. These structures, for Althusser, are both agents of repression and inevitable - it is impossible to escape ideology; to not be subjected to it.

That makes sense in the scope of PIB because the categories the balls use correspond to conventional walks/characters in societies. The contestants in a particular category are rated on their "realness," so they are rated on how well they embrace or reflect that category's ideology. Very often the categories can be a culmination of what ball participants are NOT (straight, white, middle, upper middle, upper class), yet they are influenced by those ideals and completely aware of how the outside world views them as gay minorities.

For Althusser, theoretical practice takes place entirely within the realm of thought, working upon theoretical objects and never coming into direct contact with the real object that it aims to know. On this view, the validity of knowledge is not guaranteed by its correspondence to something external to itself; because Marx's historical materialism is a science, it contains its own internal methods of proof. It is therefore not governed by interests of society, class, ideology or politics, and is distinct from the economic superstructure.

I'm not sure how yet, but this sounds important. Moving on, wikipedia on Nietzsche has way too much to consume at this time. My basic impression is that he doesn't like religion and values the individual, but acknowledges that an individual does not exist in a vacuum. Yay, that's like Lacan, and I understand him.

First vocab word: interpellation,

• "the process by which ideology addresses the (abstract) pre-ideological individual thus effectively producing him or her as subject proper."
• "specifically involves the moment and process of recognition of interaction with the ideology at hand"
• to identify or be identified with the particular ideology

That's what happens in PIB! The contestants take on the persona of the category! Interpellation!

Butler quote: "The force of repetition in language may be the paradoxical condition by which a certain agency--not linked to a fiction of the ego as a master of circumstance--is derived from the impossibility of choice." This reminds me of Kramerae and the failure of language to represent women. It also applies to PIB in that ball participants do not have a niche in society so they interpellate the ideology that surrounds them (and that interpellation becomes ball ideology later in the film).

Vocab word: chiasmic, or chiasmus, "two or more clauses are related to each other through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point; that is, the clauses display inverted parallelism"

Butler says that the gab between identity and ideology is a place for renegotiating that relationship. She also echoes Lacan in that the self is constructed by ideology and the self. At this "nexus" negotiation can occur. She claims that drag may not be a subversion but another way of aggravating the social gender norms already in place, but there is some ambivalence because the structures aren't natural (perhaps?).

Butler argues against hooks, claiming that defining gender requires the use of a set of norms, and one cannot absorb a new set of norms without losing something in the process. Basically, Butler states that equating cross dressing with misogyny misrepresents cross dressers and is a sort of colonialism in reverse--that male homosexuality is the result of a man having a bad experience with women, which isn't what PIB is about. For Butler PIB is a demonstration of negotiating between the established gender roles that do not work for ball participants. Drag questions "normativity." The ball "exposes the norms that regulate realness as themselves." They are positing that gender/sex is a construction!

Also, Livingston herself, as the filmmaker is constructing a reality for her audience, and that reality for us is different from the reality the contestants experience. Butler closes with some commentary on language and semiotics, stuff that still confuses me. But the point here is to connect her chosen epigraphs with her commentary on PIB. Basically, Butler says that all these labels the ball contestants play with are socialized norms, and the toying around happens with categories other than race. So, the contestants in PIB negotiate on the continuum to demonstrate the ambivalence gender, race, class, occupation, etc. carry