Phew! We made it through the first half of Judith Butler, and by the time you’re reading this, you’ve hopefully read through the second selection from her. Butler’s work is challenging, as we said in class, but her ideas really give us different perspectives on gender and sex and what it means to perform identity in the world. (You’ll also be pleased to hear that, while these are not the last two readings that will make your head hurt, they are the last two that feature such dense sentence structures. So yay! We’ve made it through what I would consider to be some of the most difficult readings. 🙂 )
In class Tuesday we watched a few clips of Paris is Burning (1987), the documentary by Jennie Livingston which Butler writes about directly in one of the chapters of Bodies that Matter we read for today as part of her discussion of gender performance and heteronormativity. We also watched clips from the FX show Pose (2018-2021), which is set in 1987 and is based off of Paris is Burning. In case you’d like to rewatch some of those clips, here’s what we watched and where to find them, along with a couple clips we didn’t have time to watch together that go along with Butler’s discussion of bodies, realness, heteronormativity, and gender performance:
- You can find the PiB in its entirety on AppleTV. (I highly recommend it!)
- PiB: What is a Ball? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbv6OR1Fzpk
- PiB: What is a House? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qWaAS3olWQ
- PiB: What is a Category? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wITnguCPHBI
- PiB: What is Realness? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHpt37S3wL8
- Pose is on Netflix, the FX streaming platform, and can be paid for per episode on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play, and AppleTV. (Content warning: sex and nudity.)
- Pose Season 1: Episode 1, up to opening title sequence – “mopping” the museum and walking the royalty category; Blanca is called a “cross dresser” by her sisters
- Pose Season 1: Episode 4, up to opening title sequence – Candy walks a luscious body category; Candy’s realness is called into question; heteronormative body standards
- Pose Season 1: Episode 4, 15:40-21:23 – Elektra confronts her boyfriend/benefactor about wanting a transition operation in order to be her true self; Candy stays true to her perception of who she wants to be; misogyny and heteronormativity abound!
- Pose Season 1: Episode 8, 37:25-43:13 – battle between House of Ferocity and House of Evangelista; categories that include different types of gender performance and levels of realness; Pray Tell’s commentary on realness and femininity/masculinity
In Bodies that Matter, Butler writes:
The compulsion to repeat an injury is not necessarily the compulsion to repeat the injury in the same way or to stay fully within the traumatic orbit of that injury. 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 master of circumstance—is derived from the impossibility of choice. It is in this sense that Irigaray’s critical mime of Plato, the fiction of the lesbian phallus, and the 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…. There is no subject prior to its constructions, and neither is the subject determined by those constructions; it is always the nexus, the non-space of cultural collision, in which the demand to resignify or repeat the very terms which constitute the “we” cannot be summarily refused, but neither can they be followed in strict obedience. It is the space of this ambivalence which opens up the possibility of a reworking of the very terms by which subjectivation proceeds — and fails to proceed. (84)
I want us to think more about Butler’s idea drag and of “repeating” gender norms as a subversive act that sometimes goes wrong as happened with Venus Extravaganza in Paris is Burning (sorry – Butler gave a major spoiler there, folks). Let’s consider this in terms of what we watched on Tuesday as well as other instances of drag and subversive gender performance we see in pop culture.
For our Moodle discussion board post today, please find one (or two, if you’d like) music videos, scenes from TV or films, or other performances where performers have used drag subversively. So we’re not talking about the kind of non-subversive drag Butler discusses from straight performers like we see in Mrs. Doubtfire or White Girls or Madea’s Family Reunion. Think more along the lines of David Bowie in “Boys Keep Swinging” (1979) or Lil Nas X in “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” (2021) or Janelle Monae feat. Erykah Badu in “Q.U.E.E.N.” (2012). Respond to the following questions in your post: Where do you see connections between the music videos, scenes, etc. and Butler’s argument about drag as a subversive act? What is remarkable about the way the artist or actor is performing gender in the piece? What makes the gender performance subversive? How is the artist or actor messing with heteronormative ideas of gender? If possible, try to include links to the video or scene so others can watch it as they reply to your post. We’ll talk about your posts and watch some of these videos in class on Tuesday.
Remember that for Tuesday, we’ll be discussing your annotations on Gayle Rubin’s “Of Catamites and Kings” after listening to Maria’s presentation on Rubin, and will be discussing the first section up to p. 44, stopping before “The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses,” of Jeanette Winterson’s novel, Sexing the Cherry. I’m looking forward to our conversation! 🙂
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