Opulence, you own everything! : Appropriation, excess and fantasy as critique in queer performance

Lustrous pearls adorning the décolletage, fur stole flung effortlessly over the shoulder, puppy in hand- itself bejeweled- a model struts her stuff down a runway. Against all odds, this scene finds its origins far from a Paris Fashion Week catwalk. Rather, we find the fashion capital in flames in Jennie Livingston’s 1991 documentary, Paris is Burning, as this lavishly dressed figure is revealed to be a drag queen executing her closest mimicry of that haute couture model in a Harlem ballroom. Fortifying this fleeting fantasy is the voice of emcee Junior LaBeija, who triumphantly proclaims: “Opulence, you own everything!” And for a transient moment, albeit illusory, she does own everything. In abjuring the distinction between existence and essence, realness is achieved- an indistinguishability from the real haute couture model, the affluent, the white ideal, the hegemonic. Realness thus constitutes the site of a phantasmatic transformation- sartorial, gestural and performative, a symbolic crossing over by an individual outside the racial and sexual mainstream to a realm of power. Through the tragicomic imitation of a morphological ideal, this drag queen- black, queer, and likely impoverished- comes to actualise the aesthetic of owning everything, so convincing one could almost forget the great chasm between that which is being imitated and that which is actually real- real being racism, homophobia, and poverty. 

Elucidated by queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, the concept of disidentification, as it pertains to imitation, echoes through much of the strategies of resistance employed by the African-American and Latinx performers in Paris is Burning. These strategies- namely the hyperbolic parodying of dominant norms- neither opt to align with the cultural logics of dominant ideologies, nor do they strictly oppose them; rather, they seek to negotiate with the phobic majoritarian sphere by “transforming these works for their own cultural purposes” (Muñoz, 1999). Naturally, this alignment calls into question whether the denaturalization of a dominant norm, by its exaggerated rearticulation, succeeds in displacing that norm, or serves to perpetually reidealize it, to inculcate the very phobic ideals one seeks to annihilate. Though epitomised through aesthetics, these ideals bear implications beyond the superficial, lest we forget what is at stake here- the end of Paris is Burning sees the brutal murder of Venus Xtravaganza, a Latina transgender woman of the ballroom community- a painful reaffirmation that the destabilization of gender does not necessarily entail a liberation from hegemonic constraint. This tension is one that persists now, as drag surges in popularity while transphobic and homophobic hate crimes simultaneously surge in numbers.

The radical potential of drag, it seems, is located in its willingness to abjure the distinction between truth and fantasy- to embrace artifice seriously by staging fictions of gender, class, sexuality, and the body to which we remain firmly attached. Yet, as Slavoj Žižek contends, if the very nature of ideological interpellation is such that we persist in it, insisting on the futility of ‘cynical distance’ as he calls it (Greer, 2014, p. 78), how are we to account for the longstanding attribution of drag’s critical power to a mimicry that accentuates this distance? Judith Butler, on the other hand, is more optimistic; countering Žižek’s equation of disidentification to political immobilization, she puts forward the possibility of politicizing disidentification, citing it as a “point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference” (1993, p. 219). With a recognition of that which is at stake- fundamental human rights, to be precise- this essay aims to engage with the discomfort surrounding the aforementioned question of disidentification’s precarious implications. This tension can be productive; resisting its characterisation as a deadlock, I aim to highlight the hybrid conceptual terrain wherein performative critique possesses the possibility to enact systemic change within and against the hegemonic order, and additionally forge kinships that preserve queer existence- a defiant act in itself. Premised on Judith Butler’s gender performativity and Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation, I will mobilise Muñoz’s rhetorical practice of disidentification to analyse the mode by which drag performers, particularly those in Paris is Burning, situate themselves within and against dominant discourses through which they are called upon to identify, and ultimately fail to. With a focus on the transformative dimension of queer theatricality, this analysis will further centre on the function of opulence, as the aesthetic of abundance, to assess its efficacy as liberationist political critique. For the purposes of this essay, it is critical to note that despite a premise on performative views of gender, a necessary distinction- though mutually inclusive- between the identities and (dis)identifications of transgender individuals and drag performers is recognised.

Paris is Burning (1991) is a landmark documentary that chronicles the ballroom subculture of African-American and Latinx queers in New York City during the 1980s. Seven years in the making, the film offers an intimate portrait of drag balls in their golden age, following the members of rival fashion ‘houses’ as they navigate their identities, ball competitions, and the adversities of a world rampant with homophobia, transphobia, and classism.  In the competitions, contestants walk under a specific category as they execute their closest emulation- sartorial, gestural and performative- of a member of the stated category, many of which are drawn from hegemonic white culture as signifiers of class, e.g. ‘executive realness’ and the Ivy League student (Butler, 1999, p. 341). That is not to say, however, that whiteness is the sole site of articulation for this ideologically-implicated transformation; in fact, many of the categories, such as ‘banjee’, reflect a straightness not originating in white culture, but rather a racialized and hence frequently masculinised heterosexuality. The primary standard amongst which contestants are judged for these performances is ‘realness’- and central to ‘realness’ is the ability to compel belief, to approximate legitimacy by producing the naturalised effect (Butler, 1999, p. 341). With the ideology that one can ‘dress for success’, the performances in Paris Is Burning certainly may produce a resistance at the level of subjectivity, with many of the participants hoping to deploy their appearance as the vehicle into becoming “a rich somebody”. What is not so apparent, however, is whether ballroom drag considers how such tokenization or meritocracy may well be at the service of entrenching the same relations of exploitation it seeks to dismantle (Champagne, 1995, p. 113). And more critically, Paris is Burning as a whole rouses the central dilemma of queer performance: is the affective power of spectacle sufficient to invigorate a resistance at a structural level? And in turn, can the critical power yielded by drag, by its representational strategies of parody, masquerade and creolization, serve as an end in and of itself?

In his seminal book Disidentifications: Queers of Colour and the Performance of Politics, José Esteban Muñoz depicts the survival strategies of minoritarian subjects cultivated in response to the cultural logics that undergird state power- namely, heteronormativity, misogyny and white supremacy. In the face of such hegemonic forces, Muñoz explains, those who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship must interface with alternative subcultural fields and identificatory sites in order to forge a sense of self (1999, p. 5). In so doing, the subject may opt for the assimilationist, ‘model minority’ exemplar, or alternatively, counter-identify entirely by rejecting majoritarian cultural signifiers (Klitgård, 2019, p. 120). Central to Muñoz’s text is the introduction of a third account of minoritarian cultural politics in its confrontation with the white heterosexual paradigm- disidentification, whereby one embraces the failed interpellation in an incorporation of the contradictions that the misrecognition produces- a recovery of elided or disavowed identifications. Predicated on political theorist William E. Connolly’s account of self-formation, Muñoz positions his formulation within the now stale essentialism versus anti-essentialism debate, as it pertains to identity, by citing a hybridized take as a reprieve from this seeming deadlock. Connolly’s formulation treats identity as a site of struggle where entrenched, ‘essential’ dispositions encounter socially constituted narratives of the self, a productive clash which understands power and discourse to be unstable formations. However, for Louis Althusser, ideology is an inescapable realm, embedded in state apparatuses, by which a preconstituted subject is “hailed” into being. In keeping with the Althusserian concept of interpellation, this call-and-response system- a subject-forming hail- implies that “there is no ideology except by the subject and for the subject” (Althusser, 2001, p. 115). Yet, for many, it seems that Althusser’s emphasis on the institutionally entrenched nature of ideology, interpellated as a unilateral operation, leaves little room for the potential of a rejection of the subject-forming hail. What are the possibilities for an identity where a subject disobeys an interpellating law? In Ideology, Discourse, and Cultural Studies: The Contribution of Michel Pêcheux, Montgomery and Allan bring light to Michel Pêcheux’s schema of disidentification, one that offers possibilities for the realization of a counter-hegemonic politic at the level of a call-and-response encounter. In the context of drag, this schema takes on the form of a parodic conformity that calls into question the legitimacy of the command, a hyperbolic reiteration of the interpellative law against the very authority that delivers it, a working ‘on and against’ hegemonic order. The moment when fixed predispositions and socially encoded scripts of identity collide serves precisely as the point at which “hybrid, racially predicated, and deviantly gendered identities arrive at representation” (Muñoz, 1999, p. 6). In so doing, according to Muñoz, the symbolic order “receives a jolt that may reverberate loudly and widely, or in less dramatic, yet locally indispensable ways” (1999, p. 6). But in exactly what form does this ‘jolt’ materialize? Judith Butler contests that drag, with mimicry being its nexus, is a “site of a certain ambivalence, one which reflects the more general situation of being implicated in the very regimes of power one opposes” (1999, p. 338). 

In Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, Butler discusses the reception of her seminal work, Gender Trouble, critically; she states that while many readers understood the text as advocating for the proliferation of drag as a means of subverting dominant norms, Butler herself insists that “there is no necessary relation between drag and subversion” (1999, p. 338). Rather, she positions herself with a teetering ambivalence toward the implications of mimicry, maintaining that drag may well be used as a vehicle for both the denaturalization and reconsolidation of hegemonic norms. Within the framework of gender performativity, it could be argued that all gender is like drag, or is drag. What this implies is that mimicry is too at the heart of the cis-heterosexual project, that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a continual effort to resignify its own idealizations for which no original exists, to undertake pathologizing practices in order to consecrate its own claim on propriety, ever haunted by the ‘alternative’ sexual possibilities that may threaten its categorical stability (Butler, 1999, p. 338). If one is to follow this line of reasoning, drag is then critical to the extent that it destabilises hegemonic gender by demonstrating the imitative nature by which the cis-heterosexual identity is itself produced- that is, if gender is a rearticulation of norms which “precede, constrain and exceed the performer” (Butler, 1993, p. 24), then disidentification is made manifest in drag in that it envisions the possibilities of a subjectivity beyond the dominant identifications by occupying and (re)appropriating those same identifications (Greer, 2014, p. 85). In so doing, drag harnesses the potential to establish ‘counterpublics’ as Muñoz calls them, wherein “communities and relational chains of resistance…contest the dominant public sphere” (1999, p. 146) , inasmuch as its disidentificatory performances, by tactically misrecognising the interpellative hail, expose the pathologizing and exclusionary machinations of hegemonic ideology and ultimately rework its structures to include and empower marginalized identities (Greer, 2014, p. 86). 

In his analysis of the process of ‘tactical misrecognition’, however, Stephen Greer characterises performance ‘amateurism’ as vital for an effective critique, implicitly problematizing the notion of realness in drag balls. Where the approximation of realness wields a critical irony upon the equation of gender to drag (the dominant norm emulated precisely to achieve realness being fictitious itself), Žižek’s claim that “an ideological edifice might be undermined by a too literal identification” (2008, p. 703) countermands it. Described as “a form of labour that misses a mark or under-achieves intentionally” (Bailes qtd in Greer, 2014, p. 87), performance ‘amateurism’ deploys self-aware ‘errors’ of presentation to capitalise on the chasm between what could be achieved through a virtuosic performance and what is being achieved. In wavering between two horizons of value, ‘amateurism’ presents a means of detecting the exclusionary and unattainable workings of power on which hegemonic representation relies. What this implies for Paris is Burning is that the sincerity displayed by the ball contestants to approximate the legitimacy of the ideal may inadvertently undermine the critical power of their performances. And although understood to be mimicry in the context of the balls, many of the performers, in between intertitles, describe their desire to “live a normal happy life”- a desire that anchors the interpellative powers of the heterosexual ideal. When Venus Xtravaganza, who is later murdered in a transphobic hate crime, explains how she “would like to be a spoiled rich white girl”, to “get married in church, in white”, to be “a complete woman”, it necessarily evokes the question of whether her efforts at denaturalising gender and sexuality culminates in a restructuring of the cis-heterosexual norm. Drawing upon Gramsci, Butler contends that the accumulated force of these entrenched hegemonies-  gendered, racial and economic- overwhelms “the more fragile effort to build an alternative cultural configuration from or against that more powerful regime” (1999, p. 344). This is exemplified by the account of Venus’s death at the end of the film, as we are painfully reminded of the potentially fatal implications of denaturalisation- that is, while she transgresses the frameworks of hegemonic gender and sexuality, Butler explains, “the hegemony that reinscribes the privileges of normative femininity and whiteness wields the power to renaturalize [her] body”, as her murderer presumes her cisgenderedness in a concealment of the prior transgression, “an erasure that is her death” (1999, pp. 344-345).

Similarly, by approaching the disidentificatory performances in Paris is Burning as both an instance and representation of nonproductive expenditure, drag may be read as a parodic fulfilment of an interpellative hail that inadvertently produces the opposite effect; rather than destabilising consumerist culture, it merely reifies it. In accordance with Butler’s foregrounding of gender as the site of articulation, it is necessary that the economic is neither privileged as the sole mode of transformation, nor is its role in the functioning of hegemonic order overlooked. On one hand, the excessively stylized body, with its large dose of affect, critically displaces the modestly gendered body of the disciplined subject, allowing for an indulgence otherwise deprived of the performer. In a concealment of their real economic conditions- and for much of the performers, this being poverty- the synthesis of material excess with skilful artifice transmogrifies the impoverished body into a simulacrum of wealth; when emcee Junior LaBeija proclaims “Opulence!”, it is not so much a reflection of an actual state of abundance so much as an aesthetic of abundance. Opulence thus serves as the vehicle by which the disidentifying subject forges the fantasy of abundance, not merely for the sake of gratuitous glitz and hedonism, but rather to underscore the unjust conditions borne at the intersection of race with class, of blackness with economic disadvantage. With a shift to reception, however, Champagne cites the “wanton expenditure and glamour” of the disidentifying body as overwhelming its spectator with “an ‘excess’ of pleasurable affect” (2014, p. 123), the same affective response bell hooks condemns as voyeurism in her provocative review of the film. What this means for Paris is Burning, as per Champagne, is that it runs the risk of valorizing the ‘nobility’ of conspicuous consumption (2014, p. 123)- a necessary critique that accentuates the interwoven machinations of racism, homophobia and classism under capitalism, but which also fails to offer alternatives for a disidentificatory practice grounded in the appropriation of the very norms instilled by the ideological state apparatuses of capitalism. That said, it would be reductive to examine the critical power of drag exclusively through the individual transformations undertaken by disidentifying subjects. What remains at the core of the ballroom scene documented by Livingston is the forging of a collective minoritarian counterpublic; between the narrative intercuts, we bear witness to the myriad (dis)identifications of the ballroom community: those who undergo these elaborate metamorphoses only within the parameters of the ball; those who cross-dress in public as well as in the balls but resist the label of transgender; those who identify as transgender and additionally participate in drag. Amongst these varied iterations of disidentification is the common denominator of marginalization, which, despite all its adversities, possesses a silver lining of kinship that reconfigures the exclusionary structures and temporalities of a hegemonic cis-heterosexual way of life- a resignification of family. Not only do these systems of kinship, constituted by ‘mothers’, ‘children’ and ‘houses’, sustain the balls themselves, but provide sustenance, solidarity and hope for a historically oppressed community in the face of racism, poverty and homophobia. It is crucial to note that the resignification of a nuclear family is not an insignificant imitation- in fact, it is the elaboration of kinship forged through an appropriation of the very structures that oppress it “that such a resignification creates the discursive and social space for a community” (Butler, 1999, p. 348).

As drag enters the mainstream, the discursive limits of queer performance must undoubtedly expand upon the prospects of commercialization, deradicalization and gentrification. Taking into account the myriad dilemmas invoked by this mainstreaming, in conjunction with the longstanding questions pertaining to its efficacy as a counter-hegemonic critique, drag continues to be a site of ambivalence that, in its varied iterations, reflects the strained condition of a minoritarian community as it collides with the majoritarian. What comes of it, at the very least, is an undoubtedly exhilarating glimpse into the possibilities of self-presentation outside the exclusionary works of the white cis-heterosexual paradigm, presentations that hold the self-proclaimed licence to destabilize our preconceptions that uphold structures of institutionalized racism, homophobia and misogyny. Paris is Burning represents a mere fragment of an infinitely broader history, and history to be made, but it certainly betrays the larger condition of drag as neither an unequivocal insurrection nor a painful re-subordination. If, as per Althusser, ideology is an inescapable realm, then drag demonstrates that, in spite of this fact, discourse neither necessarily determines a subject and nor does it foreclose the possibility of individual agency. But whether drag as a disidentificatory practice, in its totality, can wield a resistance at a structural level remains unclear. At its core, drag projects fantasies in the hope of their fruition, and even where this falls short, is it not a resistance to self-preserve, to mobilise one’s agency when its erasure and suppression are awfully convenient for the hegemonic machinations of the world? And perhaps it is the very fact of drag’s ambiguity that sustains its status as a site of subversion, a domain that circumvents demarcation and definition, and hence serves a vehicle for unhindered queer expression in all its variations. 

Works cited

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