Documentary/Archive/Repertoire
If many of the concerns that vexed Paris is Burning’s initial reception still haunt actual queer of color lives, the status of the film has changed through the sheer force of time. Nyong’o writes that “rather than standing in for ball culture – an unfair expectation of any single film, no matter how amazing — the film could be understood as part of queer history, and specifically part of the ball culture’s history, and even part of its futurity as well.”[3] More productive than making a metonymic critique of the film’s failures to represent the multiple facets of ballroom culture (a culture that is, in its very nature, multifaceted and elusive), Nyong’o highlights the ability of the film to showcase the authenticity and contradiction that are inherent to ballroom culture. While there are certainly complex, and even problematic elements at play with Paris is Burning, the film cannot be disregarded for the simple fact of the overall awareness it raised about the black queer demographic that makes up the ballroom community. The film is spectacle, but so is the art form it showcases.
The legacy of Paris is Burning in the academic discourse and popular culture reminds us that the medium is not, in fact, always equivalent to the message. Nyong’o points out that the historical position of the film, and the critiques that followed it, contrasts with today’s born-digital age. The increased proliferation of smart phone produced media, viral videos, and “webcams and reality TV” have resulted in an increased tactic of “broadcasting our daily lives in a potential revenue stream, if only we make that life interesting/outrageous/abject enough.”[4] Where Harper and others once focused on the material condition of the ball-goers lives and Livingston’s means of production, Nyong’o notes that a culture of ego-casting fueled by new media not only disrupts the documentarian and subject divide but also renders “performance […] almost a default setting for everyone.” As Nyong'o points out, "Octavia St. Laurent’s and Venus Xtravaganza’s expectations of celebrity, that once seemed tinged with pathos, now seem like viable career ambitions. Dorian Corey’s world-wise wisdom about the illusions of fame seem to come from a vanished queer world now lost in the glare of mass media visibility."
Questions of cultural appropriation have recently been renewed, as evidenced by the controversy over Miley Cyrus’s foray into the African American dance style “twerking” at the 2013 MTV Music Video Awards. Yet these age-old issues of racial appropriation that Eric Lott famously framed as an ambivalent interracial relation of “love and theft” significantly change with technological advances.[5] It is ironic that the same summer of the Brooklyn Pride debacle saw the debut of Tangerine (2015), a day-in-the-life narrative feature about black trans sex workers, based largely on the experiences of its main amateur actresses.[6] One wonders whether this movie was not similarly accused of cultural appropriation because audiences and critics were distracted by the fact that its white cis-male director, Sean Bake,r shot it entirely on an iPhone for one-fifth of Livingston’s budget. The mashup of heightened technophilia and social-justice enthusiasm for the “trans tipping point” of the last few years may account for Tangerine’s free pass, but we would note that the burden of queer of color “liveness” is still at play with this movie. Tangerine’s trailer shows how the grit and grain of the cell phone format recovers some glamour by “goin’ hard” with performance and soundtrack.
Yet Nyong’o also states that “Vogueing and walking on the Celebrate Brooklyn stage – welcome as it was --does nothing to transform the real conditions of poverty, racism, and transphobia,” which continue to plague members of the ballroom scene.[7] Paris is Burning arguably catalyzed not just queer theory but the materialist articulations of what is now recognized as “queer of color critique.” Indeed, Muñoz’s foundational text Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics pointedly pivots toward the documentary The Salt Mines (1990) with its “starker and less glamorous” rendering of black and Latinx trans life in New York as an “antidote” to the sensational ethos of Paris.[8] As performance studies scholars, Nyong’o and Muñoz are hardly dismissing spectacle outright in favor of deterministic historical materialism; rather, they argue that queer of color critique dialectically measures the real conditions of the past and present with fantasy worlds that make for livable lives. Nyong'o suggests that the new materiality of digitally mediated lives will affect not just fleshly embodiments but emergent methodologies of critique.
We are reminded here of Diana Taylor’s foundational performance studies work on the distinction between the archive and the repertoire. “As opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same. The repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning.”[9] While resisting any simplistic dichotomy, Taylor notes that the archive/repertoire distinction tends to align with a colonizer/colonized division. Documentary craft like Livingston’s purport to preserve the repertoire of the ball for a lasting queer archive. Yet even these divisions dissolve in the context of an organization like REACH LA, which hosts balls; teaches dance, vogue, and walking classes; provides material services for HIV prevention, and has inadvertently accumulated a rich archive. Taylor issues a pessimistic view of how the digital era will be effected by the embodied knowledge system of the repertoire: “Now, on the brink of the digital revolution that both utilizes and threatens to displace writing, the body again seems poised to disappear in a virtual space that eludes embodiment.”[10] We, by contrast think that the analog and digital collaborations embodied by the world of REACH suggest new choreographies of meaning.
Upon our initial release of Grit and Glamour's ongoing project, the FX scripted show Pose (2018-) produced by television's white gay cis-male enfante terrible Ryan Murphy, has premiered and is now bingeable for those who have access to . Many of the "authors" of the "trans tipping point" -- Janet Mock (Marie Claire), Silas Howard (Transparent), and Our Lady J. (Transparent) -- are authors of this venture. But so are the actresses and producers, many of whom come directly from the New York house/ball scene and have no training as Hollywood actors, writers, or producers. Will Pose register as cultural appropriation or the end of the very concept? Murphy respects the "old ways," invents new categories, and is hailed as the Mother of the House of Murphy, having taken over Steven Canals's idea for a scripted show about the house/ball sceneplay, originally presented by Livingston, who was initially consulted and eventually taken on as a producer. [fn]
Pose goes through it's L-Word moment of seemingly necessary aesthetic shame for the better good of social justice, indulging as it does in an after-school special tone that, in the end, works as it gets more serious about HIV, homelessness, and illegal work. The children in the houses need to know about HIV/AIDS. Safe sex matters. This show is about the dangers of sex and gender desire, and it is about how and why people take risks to be and become, in knowledge and in spite of knowledge. To want to become, to want to have sex without fear, to live at all in a world that wants you to just die and go away becomes the lietmotif of Pose. But so does the idea that getting a trophy at a ball is like getting a promotion at Trump Tower, a building and a man, pointedly set off-stage in this devastating yet clunky narrative about New York City in the 1980s, with its crime, crack, multi-various sex trades, neoliberal financial test-cases, post-punk/no-wave aesthetics, and hip-hop origins, and a hot-mess that no one can either deny or embrace. Does the fact that Pose is a scripted, long-form, drama solve for the complaints about Paris is Burning or make the question of cultural appropriation hotter?
[1] Tavia Nyong’o, “After the Ball,” https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2015/07/08/after-the-ball/.
[2] Nyong'o, "After the Ball."
[3] Nyong'o, "After the Ball."
[4] Nyong'o, "After the Ball."
[5] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[6] This information comes from an interview with actress Mya Taylor at Occidental College, March 16, 2017. When asked about Tangerine’s cultural appropriation and the legacy of Paris is Burning, she refused the terms of engagement with campy consternation.
[7] Nyong'o, "After the Ball"
[8] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 162. For more on the queer of color critique and historical materialism, see Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
[10] Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 20.
[11] Taylor, Archive and Repetoire, 16.
[12] Amy Villarejo, “Tarrying With the Normative: Queer Theory and Black History,” Social Text Vol.23, Nos.3&4 (Fall/Winter 2005): 69-84, 70.
[13] Jesse Green, “Paris has Burned,” New York Times, April 8, 1993.
[14] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Ovah
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