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On Female Impersonation
In a chapter entitled Is Paris Burning? from her book Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks produces a scathing critique of Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning. In the chapter, hooks focuses much of her attention on the documentary as a product/producer of a problematic white gaze, but she also levels a critique of sexism on the balls outside of their depiction. Though she indicates her belief that “Gender bending and blending on the part of Black males has always been a critique of phallocentric masculinity in traditional Black experience” (hooks 147), she moves past this statement to condemn what she refers to as “female impersonation,” stating that what “subversive power” is represented by men in drag “is radically altered when informed by a racialized fictional construction of the ‘feminine,’ that is to say when the idealized notion of the female/feminine is really a sexist idealization of white womanhood” (hooks 147). She goes on to the next page to quote Marilyn Frye’s essay Lesbian
Feminism and Gay Rights, which says
“gay men's effeminacy and donning of feminine apparel displays no love of or identification with women or the womanly. For the most part, this femininity is affected and is characterized by theatrical exaggeration. It is a casual and cynical mockery of women, for whom femininity is the trapping of oppression, but it is also a kind of play, a toying with that which is taboo., .What gay male affectation of femininity seems to be is a serious sport in which men may exercise their power and control over the femi- nine, much as in other sports...But the mastery of the feminine is not feminine. It is masculine"
While I understand the dynamics to which hooks is referring, and I recognize that my own subjectivity prevents me from seeing clearly the full impact of my freedom and expression as a male identified individual, I think that the notions put forth by hooks in this article overlook a critical understanding of gender as uniformly and inherently performative. There is a real instrumentalization of femininity that reinforces patriarchal relationships within the gender binary, upon which hooks reflects, but I disagree with her assessment of the underground ballroom scene as part of that project. There is more to Paris is Burning, the ballroom scene more broadly, and the individuals that hooks identifies as “Black males [who] take appearing in drag seriously” (147).
The first limitation of hooks’ argument is a limited conception of what is and what is not drag. Ballrooms, drag races and the like assume an understanding of gender performance as separate from sexual characteristics and assignment. That understanding has been articulated by many and has been demonstrated by many more. The scene in Paris is Burning wherein Pepper LaBeija expresses her thoughts on sexual reassignment surgeries is an example of how that understanding can be assumed and not articulated, and it is understandable that expressions such as these might contribute to a popular conflation of drag with gender performance exclusively on the stage. The critique in Is Paris Burning? is built on this conflation; in arguing against drag and the balls, hooks erroneously identifies them as unnatural and different from performances in other spaces, such the street, the store or the home. I do not discount at all the performativeness of the balls, but I also want to call attention to the performances taking place everywhere else which are not seen as such. There backdrop footage in the film of the mostly white, presumably heterosexual and cisgendered masses are performing gender just as Pepper LaBeija does on the runway. Judith Butler provides critical insight and academic language to the performance inherent to gender, in her essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” where she says the following:
“gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding
gendered self” (519)
Gender is not a quality that we are born with, it is instead a facet of our identity that continually create by sampling the gendered environments which surround us. So when hooks calls attention to the performativeness of the balls in order to discredit them, it is important to understand that she overlooks the performances of “regular” or “real” life and in that has already taken a normative stance.
In the same way that she critiques the practices within ballrooms for being performative, hooks critiques the ballrooms themselves as “construct[ed]…mythic world[s]” (hooks 156), spaces imbued with meaning that she trivializes as fictional. The logic of this facet of her critique fails also when the fictionality of other public spaces is considered. When you understand the meaning embedded in churches and schools and markets as similarly constructed, that critique does not stand. Marlon Bailey, in an essay entitled Engendering space, describes the work of the House of Ford “to drastically rearrange the Crystal Ballroom in the Masonic Temple to make it look and feel like the proper space for a,” 2001 Detroit Ball. “The Masonic Temple is known as a multipurpose venue and although it hosts many different types of events, normally when it is rented for local community gatherings they are large heteronormative events, namely weddings or religious gatherings” (Bailey 11). The possibility of rewriting the meaning of a space to make it conducive to a ball, means that the original meaning was not written in stone, but agreed upon in the same manner that the rules of the balls are. No social fiction is more or less real than another.
Without the notion of fiction as flaw, hooks’ critique hinges on “femininity [as] the trapping of oppression” (hooks 148), that femininity is for gay men a sport and for all women a genetic hinderance. This critique I’ve understood in the context of scenarios like the following made up example: a male identified individual who walks the butch queen category of banjee girl realness. Friction is manifested when that male identified individual puts the banjee girl away and walks home wearing “authentic” masculinity and is emboldened to restrict the life, liberty and or pursuit of happiness of “real” banjee girl who has no other identity she can wear. This conception is narrow in that it conflates gender with a simplistic notion of binary assignment. The way that hooks articulates her arguments, namely in hanging assertions on “men” and “women,” makes it difficult to map her critique onto the population that she is describing. Marlon Bailey, in the essay I quoted before, details the gender system in the Ballroom scene, which consists of three sexes: female, male, and intersex, as well as six genders: butch queens, femme queens, butch queens up in drag, butches, women and men. The flattening of gender categories which hooks undertakes, not to mention the erasure of biologically born women (for which Jenni Livingston’s decisions might be responsible) from the ballrooms, establishes an unstable foundation for the rest of her critique.
Moving forward with the gender system of the balls in mind, her critique is really being leveled against the butch queens (up in drag) and the crux of her argument is still the idea that “femininity is the trapping of oppression” (hooks 148) for women and just a game or fictional identity for these men. My instinctual reaction is to come at this question by asserting the meaning of the ballroom to queens, but that importance is evident in the film; a more fruitful line of reasoning is the legitimate claim which butch queens (up in drag) have to femininity, and I’ll pursue that later. First, I want to question the relationship between notions of biological womanhood, femininity, trapping and oppression. The phrase which hooks quotes: “femininity is the trapping of oppression,” can be interpreted in different ways. For example it could be arguing that society’s expectation of femininity is trapping in its limitation of those who physically appear to be biological women to feminine behavior and gender presentation, and in this case I would agree; I would also suggest that a similar expectation of masculinity is forced onto men, particularly Black men. I think it more likely however that this articulation means that women are trapped because of their (inherent) femininity, which obscures the reality that women, particularly Black women, are targeted, attacked, and excluded for being women regardless of their expression of gender. If we think about the New Jersey Four, they were not (all) femme-presenting, and their profiles as Black lesbians further disincluded them from society’s conception of femininity. The femininity of these women did not trap them, the sexist man on the street who read them as women (as well as the subsequent racist/sexist judges/juries) did. It would seem that femininity is one gender presentation factor which influences the oppression that women face. Femininity exists in those who are not cis women, including butch queens. I question the articulation of female impersonation, in favor of a performance of femininity developed by Black people socialized together in a common gendered, racially stratified society. In “Techniques of Black male re/dress”, Naomi Bragin offers some useful insights into the processes of feminine performance. Waacking, which she introduces in this paper, is an “improvisation-based technique [that] originated with movement styles of a core group of dancers who frequented…gay, primarily Black and Latino underground disco clubs of 1970s Los Angeles” (Bragin 63). Bragin traces the evolution of the dance form, and shows how the style crossed over into mainstream dance
and is now practiced primarily by cisgender non-Black women. Through participants interviews, she found that the style had fostered “a negotiation of hegemonic femininity within the body that a specifically Black queer kinesthetics makes possible.” Femininity had not been stolen or feigned by these LA men but uniquely produced, in a way that did not crowd out, negatively portray or otherwise harm women, but actually provided an alternative avenue in which to “articulate a [new] sense of power they understand to be part of the performance of ‘woman’” (Bragin 65). In understanding this case, Bragin urges us to “complicate the assumption that [women] Waacking…simply reverses a gay male appropriation” (66) and to understand that Waacking and the performances like it in Paris is Burning are “less about a normative desire to be female (and white) than transforming the meaning of such identifications themselves…for the practitioner, the sense of moving ‘as a woman’ in the body also requires a queering of the idea of
‘woman’” (Bragin 67).
The legitimate claim of queens to femininity do not constitute a full response to hooks’ critique, for she is also indicting the balls for commodifying femininity. In the beginning of the chapter, before delving into her discussion of the queens she describes cisgendered male comedians who impersonate women for comic effect. This impersonation is used toward an end; that is, it is commodified in a way that plays into the broader society’s negative perceptions of Black women. By following up descriptions of such comedians with her analysis of the balls, hooks implies a connection between queens and those comedians who actively work against women and feminine people. I understand why potentially hooks would make this argument, particularly given her recount of watching the film in a theater full of white people. Under the pressure of the white gaze, the non-normative behavior of Black men, gender non-conforming individuals and transgendered people performing femininity can be interpreted as allusion to or mockery of Black women, and that could feel similar to the patriarchal work of the sexist work of comedians. It’s crucial to understand though that this reaction fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the balls. A comedian’s femininity is funny because it is a joke; it takes gender roles and rules very seriously. A butch queen’s performance on the other hand makes a joke of those roles and rules, and that’s not funny. It is uncomfortable or deplorable and cannot be commodified in its full form, what commodification does occur is of bits and pieces made palatable to consumer bases (e.g. Madonna’s Vogue). The ball scene, and more importantly the queer gender performances that exist in and out of it, divorce men from masculinity and women from femininity and reconstitute gender as mere practices with which we are all free dabble.
The ballrooms are critically opposed to heterosexist gender norms and relations, by virtue of what they do. Unrestricted gender performance on the individual level is formally facilitated by the balls, and community is nurtured; these are critical for the wellbeing of Black queer people who cannot be actualized everywhere. Safari Allen speaks on the experience of Black gay clubs in “For ‘the Children’ Dancing the Beloved Community,” but the same sentiments apply in the balls. He talks about “the felt experience of a common union, and a nurturing of individual projects and common experience…for the Black gay club may in fact be the only place a trans person, gay man, or lesbian…may witness or participate in a vision of beloved community” (317-318). Club and ballroom spaces exist for and are shaped by queer people. They are not used toward any end other than community and self expression; they are a spaces of joy and release. “Like the jook joints, rum houses, house parties, beach limes, fish fries, and the like [which have] constituted a ‘sacred territory” for Black people, in the estimation of Bernice Reagon Johnson (qtd. in Allen 319), the balls exist because the queer people of color who frequent them need them badly. Johnson in the same quotation from above states that “the only way you know who you are sometimes has to do with what you can do when you go home from work, change clothes…and dance all night long.” This reality takes on an additional dimension because Black and queer people also must escape the home to be at home.
The balls are not a sexist project, as hooks ultimately makes them out to be, they are necessary community. For the aggressives, Black transgender and gender nonconforming people, and the Black gay men that hooks confronts, “the violence of traumatic racialized pasts very often resound, echo, and reproduce themselves in homes” (Allen 319) and communities. To be Black is to be at risk of racialized violence at the hands of the state and the racist population of this country; to be Black and queer, in a way that is not a reflection of heterosexual temporalities and sensibilities, is to be at an even greater risk of violence. The balls cannot function as an escape, because participation in the balls and the deviance they embody is more dangerous than abstention; the balls are no safe haven. For the “three-hundred-pound Black man to push and twist and serve and carry in silver hot pants and go-go boots” as Allen describes on 324, is a brave act which harms no one and risks attack from all sides. No capital is gained from participation in the balls, only stardom within the small community and ameliorated conditions for individuals in their lives. Female impersonation might be profitable for straight male comedians who use it to reinforce man and woman and woman as lesser, and its profitable because it does the work of patriarchy. Embracing femininity as a quality that is not owned by women, is nothing more than it is.
Works Cited
Allen, JafariSinclaire. "For “the Children” Dancing the Beloved Community." Souls: A Critical
Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 11.3 (2009): 311-26. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 3 June 2016.
Bailey, Marlon M. "Engendering Space: Ballroom Culture and the Spatial Practice of Possibility in Detroit." Gender, Place & Culture 21.4 (2013): 1-19. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 3
June 2016.
Bragin, Naomi. "Techniques of Black Male Re/dress: Corporeal Drag and Kinesthetic Politics in the Rebirth of Waacking/Punkin’." Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 24.1 (2014): 61-78. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 3 June 2016.
Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory." Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519-31. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 3 June 2016.
hooks, bell. "Is Paris Burning?" Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End, 1992. 145-56. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. Web. 3 June 2016.
Jung, E. Alex. "RuPaul on How Straight People Steal From Gay Culture and Why Educating the
Youth Is a Waste of Time." Vulture. New York Media, LLC, 23 Mar. 2016. Web. 03 June
2016.
Works Consulted
The Aggressives. Dir. Daniel Peddle. YouTube. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 June 2016.
Frye, Marilyn. "Lesbian Feminism and the Gay Rights Movement: Another View of Male Supremacy, Another Separatism(1F)." Lesbian Feminism & the Gay Rights Movement. Feminist Reprise, n.d. Web. 03 June 2016.
Paris Is Burning. Dir. Jennie Livingston. Off White Productions, Inc., 1990. Netflix. Web. 3 June
2016.