Olivia Writes

a response blog.

[oliviaescribe]

Obama was no god

In chapter four of This Changes Everything, author Naomi Klein discusses the way an ecologically-minded approach to a crippled economy could have improved the economy, political perspectives on climate change, and the environment as a whole. 

After George W. Bush’s presidency, the economy was in a state of disrepair. The financial crisis, often dubbed “the Great Recession,” played along poorly with a failing automotive industry, failing banks, and a stimulus package that acted as a last-ditch effort to bolster the economy. Klein writes that, “the stimulus package could have been used to build the best public transit systems and smart grids in the world. The automotive industry could have been dramatically reengineered so that its factories built the machinery to power that transition” (122). She goes on to speak about how the banks could’ve played a different role: “Retrofitting factories on that scale is is expensive, to be sure, and that’s where the bailed out banks could have come in” (123) -- the government could’ve used the leverage they had over the banks to get them to do this. 

The reason none of these things happened and the condition of our planet’s health and our nation’s position on climate change and alternative energy has continued to decline is simply, and frustratingly, a matter of culture. Right-wing politicians painted green ideas as something that would only add to our country’s debt; it would be another cost and another burden. There was little to no talk about the thousands of jobs that would’ve been created under the above model, the ability for this plan to rebuild communities was ignored, and the government was not interested in doing this kind of long-term economic planning. 

It’s incredibly frustrating to see how alternative plans could’ve been put into place that would stimulate the economy, improve communities across the country, and work on mitigating the damage we are doing to the environment. Of course, it’s not surprising, because our culture largely values a free market ideology and not one that involves long-term blueprints that involve actual benefit to real people, communities, and the planet. Alternative plans such as the one above were not marketed well or received well, and the free market ideology won over again. 

I would like to see a nation undertake this plan to see how much truth and reality the plan holds. It looks great on paper, and would take quite a bit of strategy and time to unfold, but if the benefits are as Klein supposes, it would all be worth it. 

[oliviaescribe]

Feminism and Ecological Rights

The feminist movement has had several iterations since it came to the fore in the early nineteenth century. The movement has evolved over the past hundred or so years as an ever-inclusive sociopolitical paradigm shift; what began as a (mostly) white women’s rights movement pushing for the right to vote and own property is a movement that now acknowledges inequity across lines of race and color, ability, class, body shape and weight, gender expression, and sexual expression in its fourth wave. Feminism isn’t so much anti-man or pro-woman as it is anti-patriarchy, fighting against the structures that put white, male, straight, cis interests above all others.

Ecological activism, too, has evolved over time. One of the biggest pushes in American culture to protect and preserve wildlife came during the time of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. Under Roosevelt’s time in office, the National Park system was developed and measures were taken to begin preserving swaths of wilderness. This protection was predicated under the idea that man was a steward of the land, and therefore needed to protect it. It was our backyard, after all, and who wants a backyard filled with cement and smokestacks? Roosevelt, however, was also an avid hunter and very much into colonial pursuits. Early ecological activism wasn’t perfect, by any means. The 1970s saw a major shift with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which took a look at man’s role in polluting the earth and changing the environment with our destructive practices. Today, ecological activism and green-thinking involves more than just land preservation; it considers pollution, climate change, sustainable agriculture and industry, alternative energy, preservation of endangered species, land rights, and the rights of indigenous people. Ideally, anyway… The political realm of environmental protection hasn’t quite caught up with all these ideals.

Both movements, essentially, have come to include more rights and protections for the disenfranchised. After centuries of use and abuse and marginalization by the steely grip of patriarchy, groups supported by intersectional feminism and ecological activists are gaining some footing. The rights of the Earth and the commons have by no means saturated the public conscience, but it’s finally begun that process. By examining the tenets of feminism, budding environmental activists and politicians seeking to increase protections for the earth and its people can learn how to shape the language of change to its most effective form. The earth, like every person on it, should have rights. Although it cannot speak for itself, it demands the respect every being on the planet deserves because each organism is a vital part of our collective existence and the earth itself is an organism. Just as society is a volatile, ever-evolving organism of sorts that relies on every individual within it to remain intact, so is the earth. It should be understood that our planet is a living, every-changing organism constantly changing and being changed by the other organisms that live on it. In order to keep the systems of society and ecology intact, the rights of all vectors of change must be realized and protected.

[oliviaescribe]

The Climate Change Equation

Climate Change = Capitalism + Globalism + Centrism

It’s 2017, and yes, people still ignore climate change. Even those that understand it exists ignore it, many people who are guilty of this are also guilty for rising sea levels; maybe not individually, but collectively. Those people who still do not accept climate change as a scientifically proven and witnessable fact can be explained with three simple words: hierarchical, individualistic, egocentric. Yale researchers explain that people with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (tend to value collective action and social justice) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change (36). Those who are “hierarchical” and “individualistic” (opposed to government assistance, supportive of industry, believe in meritocracy) reject this scientific consensus (36). These people tend to be politically conservative and religious, or at least believe in humankind’s superiority to and dominion over nature. As a professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne puts it, climate change is for many conservatives “an affront to their deepest and most cherished basic faith: the capacity and indeed the right of ‘mankind’ to subdue the Earth and all its fruits and to establish a ‘mastery’ over Nature” (41).

Those who many understand its existence but do nothing about it, or worse, continue to refute it, do so in the name of industry and capitalism. As the author of This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein writes, “we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis” (18). Governments and scientists began talking seriously about greenhouse gas emissions in 1988 – the same year that the term globalization was used as a way of understanding the new global economy. The measures to combat climate change have not been taken since then because policy makers and names within big, energy-producing industries believe that to regulate emissions and industry-made pollution would fetter that industry’s growth. Instead, they seek to privatize the public sphere, deregulate the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, all to fuel their money-making machines.

Scientists have vocalized the steps that need to be taken in order to slow down the rate at which sea levels rise and the atmosphere warms. The information is out there and available, and yet nothing is done because those steps stand in the way of global trade agreements and corporate productivity. It must be that those in charge of these fossil-fueled ventures know the impact their business has on the planet, because new industries pop up alongside old ones where the wealthy invest in greenspaces for “carbon credits,” develop heartier, extreme-weather tolerant seeds, and essentially bet on patterns in climate change. The centrist ideology, paired with capitalism, explains this maddening inaction and exploitation: dollar for dollar, it’s more efficient to focus on economic development than climate change.

[oliviaescribe]

Seeing Power; Art, Activism, Politics.

“A familiarity with the infrastructures of power provides the material context from which claims are made and gestures deployed. The capacity to see power matters” (115).

Nato Thompson writes that seeing power is a skill-set that “emerges as one adapts to the camouflaging effects of spectacle and familiarizes oneself with the infrastructures of power that operate behind any cultural action” (115). What he means is that being able to see and recognize power comes from studying what lies underneath cultural frameworks that we come into contact with every day. Seeing power takes conscientiousness and practice.

In order to make activist art, one must first be able to see the hierarchies and powers that are usually overshadowed by flashiness of the cultural text in question, or the people or corporations behind the products.

Thompson gives several examples of the activism that can be done through art that challenges capitalism. One such example was an art exhibit that displayed the political economy that underlay the walls of the museum at which the exhibit was presented. Haacke, the artist, showed that a museum was the product of tangible relationships to capital, which held the museum up and allowed for its existence. Haacke’s piece was well informed, he was able to see the power in capitalist relations beneath the Guggenheim museum, and used that power to make a statement that challenged what many people believe about a museum (art for art’s sake, lack of capitalist goals as a publically funded, progressive space).

Seeing power is a key component of activism. If you don’t see the framework beneath the text, it is impossible to act against it. Activism like Haacke displayed can be similarly deployed by many forms of art against many forms of power. Examples include punk music, pussy hats, anarchists’ bookstores, Banksy murals, and more. When eyes are opened to oppressive structures such as capitalism, racism, classism and patriarchy, the activism that pushes back in artistic ways is bold, powerful, and beautiful in its own way.

[oliviaescribe]

Hegemony and Legitimization

In the beginning of Seeing Power, Nato Thompson introduces ideas of capitalism, neoliberalism, cultural production, art, meaning making, and hegemony. He writes about how people make meaning of the world around them based on their experiences, and how culture, collectively, makes meaning based on the cultural texts that are prevalent in that particular society. He writes, “The media world we live in produces our worlds – and, in turn, produces us. Our understanding of art and politics is rooted in the material, but so are our professional ambitions...How we understand the world is shaped by how we experience it” (56).

Cultural texts legitimize the underlying meanings that they contain, and the more texts that contain a particular message, the more legitimate that message becomes. The messages and their legitimization are covert, and these messages grow to be systems of acceptable thought and behavior. Antonio Gramsci believed that the structures of the world produced the common sense of the world (61) and the stronger these structures are reinforced, the more powerful they are, especially because they remain hidden. This idea is what Gramsci called hegemony, the making of widespread, self-perpetuating common sense that has no necessary truth behind it.

In today’s landscape, there are a wealth of texts that reinforce racist beliefs on top of texts that have existed for centuries that reinforce the same ideologies. Many interpretations of the Bible, stories written by early American and colonial European authors, performances of Black minstrelsy, and even the insidious bias in the way new stories about police brutality on Black people are reported. The volume of these stories for centuries legitimized racism against Black people created a ‘sensible’ belief that Black people were not as valuable as White people, and were dangerous, stupid, and otherwise less-than their White counterparts. As Thompson says, “the distribution of the sensible produced within most infrastructures supports and perpetuates the unjust political economies that allow it to exist” (68). In other words, the reinforcement of racism legitimized the racism, and the legitimized racism was then believed to be sensible because of its heavy distribution.

Thompson also writes that it is important to see these sensibilities as legitimized constructs, and that when they are seen, “we can and must exploit the power of legitimation toward more progressive, more radical ends” (71).

Recently, there have been more and more texts, from websites to magazine publications to films and books, that are attempting to erase the legitimization of racism. One of the most recent, very popular examples is Jordan Peele’s film Get Out, a horror/comedy film that exposes the racism that Black people encounter day-to-day. The film is about a Black man that goes to visit his white girlfriend’s wealthy, liberal family. The film shows how engrained racism is in our culture, even among those who would “vote for Obama a third time if they could.” In exposing the deeply engrained racism even those who consider themselves liberal are guilty of, a new cultural text is added to the dominant cultural narrative that works toward erasing legitimized racism.

[oliviaescribe]

In Mississippi 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched by two men for reportedly making lascivious comments to one man’s wife, Carolyn. She said that he whistled at her while she was working in her store and said unspeakable things about his previous conduct with white women. That night, Carolyn’s husband and his half brother abducted Till and brutally bludgeoned and shot him to death. The two men were quickly acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury and the young man was quickly forgotten by those outside of the civil rights movement. 

Decades later, Carolyn admitted that he never threatened her or made inappropriate comments as she had testified in 1955. He may not have even whistled, but yet he was mercilessly and wrongfully killed for these actions.

If Emmett Till had not been black, he would not have been lynched. Carolyn would probably not have felt nearly as threatened, and she probably wouldn’t have lied about him saying he’d had relations with white women in the past. Carolyn’s husband and his brother would not have killed him, and Till might even be alive today. Till was not afforded any patience or mercy for his actions (reputed or actual) because he was a young black man. Extrajudicial killings didn’t happen to young white boys, at least not to the degree as it did for young black men. 

Carolyn’s confession did not make waves in 2007 because Emmett Till’s story had nearly disappeared after so many decades, but it’s a story we should all be versed in, especially in such a time as our current cultural climate when tensions are high and violence occurs almost unflinchingly. Whether Till said the things he was reported to say, whether he whistled at Carolyn or not, his actions certainly didn’t warrant murder.

[oliviaescribe]

The ~Panopticon~

Michel Foucault penned the concept of the Panopticon as a means of social control in 1975 with his work “Discipline and Punish.” 

His idea of discipline as a function of power came from Bentham’s circular prison concept (above). The prison was designed so that no matter where an inmate was in the prison, he could always be watched by wardens or security guards. The center of the panopticon holds a guard tower, but it is impossible to tell whether or not a guard was in the tower watching. The design of the tower made it so that a prisoner, never knowing whether or not he was being watched, always had to assume he was being watched and acted accordingly.

Foucault’s panopticon translates to societal surveillance: we keep ourselves and each other accountable for our actions, even when those who made the rules can’t possibly be watching. The internalized belief that women should be model-thin and sexually moral is an example. There is no being in power that could possibly keep each individual woman accountable for such erroneous social rules, but the woman, knowing how she must look and act, guards herself to eat less, exercise more, and not sleep around. Her friends may also guard her in the same way, speaking ill about her if she gains a few pounds or sleeps with three different men in the same month, for instance. We all know the rules, and even though no one is checking for compliance, we nevertheless comply.

[oliviaescribe]

#OscarsSoWhite -- Annenberg Report

Last year’s Academy Awards was met with a ton of criticism for the lack of color in 2016′s nominations. The first Annenberg Report, releasedin February 2016, measured diversity in the entertainment industry including on-screen and behind-the-camera in fictional films, TV shows, and digital series released by 10 main media companies: 21st Century Fox, CBS, Comcast NBC Universal, Sony, The Walt Disney Company, Time Warner, Viacom, Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix (pg. 3). 

Those who compiled the report found that most stories failed to reflect or match the racial/ethnic composition of the US population (pg 7). 18 percent of the films released by these companies had absolutely no Black/African American characters and an astounding 50 percent had not one Asian/Asian American character (pg 8). 

White directors also outnumbered underrepresented directors by almost 7:1 in the film industry, and almost 8:1 in streaming services (pg 10). 

The demographic of the Academy gives little room for surprise as to the whiteness of the Academy Awards. All 20 Oscar actor nominations were for white people, and arguably some of the best films of the year (Straight Outta Compton, Selma) were snubbed; the tastes of the Academy and those of common movie-goers did not match, and this was painfully apparent when the nominations were announced. 

[oliviaescribe]

Hegemony Cricket

“The term hegemony refers to a situation in which a provisional alliance of certain groups can exert ‘total social authority’ over other subordinate groups...by ‘winning and shaping consent so that the power of the dominant classes appears both legitimate and natural’” (Hebdige 366). In other words, hegemonic beliefs are those that are taken for granted, believed to be inherently, naturally true and not changeable structures put into place by some authority. 

In the Disney classic, Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket acts as Pinocchio’s conscience since he, an animated wooden boy, doesn’t have one. Jiminy was appointed by the Blue Fairy to teach the young boy the difference between right and wrong. He guided Pinocchio in his early animated days to avoid missteps; he taught him the way the world works. If Pinocchio did something Jiminy told him he shouldn’t do, he received quick punishment in some form or another. Jiminy Cricket acted as fully-realized hegemony; the rights and wrongs, dos and don’ts of society (all of which are open to interpretation and not matters-of-fact) spelled out by an animated cricket. 

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When the White Man Doesn’t Win -- Intersectional Privilege

In discussions of culture and systems of power, the Man (specifically the White Man) is often cited the top of power pyramid; he makes the most money, he can commit the most crimes without being sentenced to years in prison, he’s most likely to live a charmed life with a picket fence, a pretty wife, two or three kids, a dog, and an extramarital affair before his timely death (he’s also most likely to live longer than his male counterparts). 

Michael Kimmel, in his essay “Seeing Privilege Where It Isn’t,” discusses where the White Man doesn’t get his way -- when he has a disability, is gay, or is of a lower socioeconomic class. These characteristics serve to emasculate him; if he is gay, has a disability, or is not of the middle class (or higher), he’s effectively reduced to a woman’s level on the power structure (Kimmel 98). 

Hegemonic masculinity is tied to power, competitiveness, dominance, aggression, physical strength, virility, and so on. If a man is poor, he has little power in a capitalist society. If he is physically weak or submissive, he’s not able to hold his own against another man and couldn’t hope to compete for a woman. If he has no success with heterosexual romantic/sexual pursuits, he’s definitely not the manly type either. 

Take Kurt Hummel, from ABC Family’s Glee. Kurt endured years of taunting and bullying because of his sexuality and effeminate nature. Kurt is white, he’s middle class, he’s able-bodied, but he’s gay. He gets thrown into dumpsters by jocks on the football team (hey, hegemonic masculinity) only because he was gay, and slushies himself instead of having Finn do it, because Finn was pressured by the rest of the football team to bully his friend. He’s been called a fag by bullies during the series and even tries becoming straight so that his father will love and accept him more. 

Glee features another character who falls outside the dominant white-guy intersection: Artie Abrams. Artie was injured in a car accident as a child and has had to use a wheelchair ever since. He also experiences relentless bullying like Kurt, not for his sexuality but for his disability.

[oliviaescribe]

Reading the Slender Body -- Lady Gaga Superbowl LI

In “Unbearable Weight,” Susan Bordo discusses our culture’s preoccupation with taut, slender bodies, specifically women’s. She writes how “fat” isn’t necessarily defined by weight, that being fat could mean having a bit more flexibility around the waistline than dominant culture deems appropriate. It isn’t enough to be slender and of low body weight, a woman must also have a “tighter, smoother, more contained body profile” (Bordo 188). 

This reading became especially relevant over the about a week and a half ago when Lady Gaga performed at the Super Bowl 51 halftime show. 

The woman is in incredible physical shape, right? She looks lean, and healthy, and must be in great shape to sing and dance simultaneously for an extended period of time. But this was the only thing many saw:

Her sides folded up a little, her belly pushed out a bit over her glitter bottoms. Big deal. And this is what many said:

Despite being in great shape and having a lean body, Gaga was deemed too fat to wear the outfit she chose for her performance. Many Tweeters were mentioning her marginal amount of flab and calling her fat because she wasn’t tight, smooth, and perfectly contained. 

Lady Gaga, as a female celebrity, is expected to have the ideal figure. She’s got the money, she’s got the resources, and many expect her to have the time to maintain corpulent perfection. Being slender (also called the bourgeois “tyranny of slenderness”) became the norm for those of the upper class towards the end of the Victorian era (Bordo 185), but apparently Gaga didn’t get the memo. 

[oliviaescribe]

The Manliness Formula in Sports News Networks

The above commercial perfectly exemplifies what Messner calls the “Manhood Formula” of televised sports. The Manhood Formula, which includes violence, sport as war, the value of aggression, and white men at the foreground of sporting culture, teaches men and boys the proper way to perform masculinity. One must be competitive, athletic, successful, and aggressive to get the prize.

During the commercial, several words pop up that describe what sport has to offer, and what NBC Sports has to offer their viewers. Some examples of these words include: “Feel,” “Connect,” “Create,” “Fight,” “Nurture,” “Hate,” “Reject,” “Work,” “Blood,” and “Sweat.” Most of the footage compiled was of male athletes engaged in very physical, violent sports. Scenes showed male athletes scoring goals, being tackled, lifting weights, having a bloody mouth, and raising trophies. The only scenes that showed women included Alex Morgan, who is considered one of the most beautiful women in sport, and the words that were used for these scenes were “Create” and “Nurture.” No mention of blood, sweat, combativeness, or pain mentioned with a female athlete. The vast majority of the athletes shown were male and white, and the way the commercial was edited together clearly defines what masculinity is composed of and what it takes to be a manly man.

Most commercials on sports networks follow the formula of the video above, where men are essentially given a how-to lesson on masculinity and a promise that engaging in sports and that sports network will make the viewer a more masculine man, while ignoring female athletes or reducing them to trophies or mothers.

[oliviaescribe]

Men at the Center of Sport

In introducing his book Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports, Michael Messner discusses the center of sport, the point of focus for any game or athletic event. Messner argues that the center of sport is male. The games, the players, the sports themselves are man-centered. This should come as no surprise since maleness (competitiveness, aggression, violence, strength, athleticism) and sport have been inextricably linked for millennia.

Messner writes, “We can locate the center of sport...by ‘following the money‘ to the most highly celebrated, rewarded, and institutionalized bodily practices that are defined largely by physical power, aggression, and violence. And sport’s center is still, by and large, a space that is actively constructed by and for men” (Messner 5). Sports media coverage is intensely focused on male activity, offering a disproportionately large amount of coverage on male athletes, male-only sports (NFL and MLB, for instance), and games with male teams. Instead of offering prime time coverage for the Women’s World Cup, for example, ESPN and other sports networks like them focus instead on male sports tournaments and male sports games.

Every four years, the FIFA World Cup takes place. FIFA also has a Women’s World Cup, which takes place the year after the men’s tournament occurs. Sports networks will often provide a ton of coverage for the FIFA World Cup, high-profile musical artists will record a soundtrack to serve as an epic anthem to the games, and millions around the world tune in to watch the festivities and the sport itself.

The women’s World Cup, however, doesn’t see nearly as many spectators or coverage from sports networks. It would be incredibly difficult to keep up with the tournament unless one made an effort to look up scores or had a subscription to a premium sports network that shows women’s soccer. Despite the fact that the US Women’s National Team has been incredibly successful in games past, they still get paid a pittance in comparison to the Men’s National Team. Five players from the USWNT have filed an action claiming wage discrimination because they found that on average, the women’s team makes four times less than the men’s team, even though they bring in much more revenue for US Soccer.

The only reason for this discrepancy is found in the center of sports. Sports networks don’t offer much women’s coverage, and they don’t believe viewers want to see female-heavy content, so they continue not to show it, even though that’s not necessarily the case. And because they don’t televise women’s sports, female athletes continue to make much less than their male counterparts, even though they may experience much more success than the male teams.

[oliviaescribe]

Black Feminism and Intersectionality

Sharon Smith, in her essay “Black Feminism and Intersectionality,” discusses an approach that combines two compositions of identity that intersect to create a dual form of opposition, or a dual form of power. She essentially argues that a person can be more than one thing, for instance, black and woman, and that this identity puts a black woman in a certain position where she may be discriminated against for both pieces of her identity. Smith includes an analogy posited by Kimberlé Crenshaw involving a traffic intersection in her argument for intersectionality; she writes:

discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination. 

Crenshaw goes on to say that it can be difficult or even impossible to pinpoint where exactly the discrimination originates from because the discrimination could be occurring simultaneously, across lines of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. One show that does an excellent job of displaying intersectionality is the Netflix-original Orange Is the New Black, an off-cable series based on a memoir detailing Piper Kerman’s years at a federal prison.

In addition to drawing attention to corruption within prisons and mental health issues, OITNB includes a primarily female cast that is also diverse in terms of sexuality, race, and socioeconomic class. The characters in this television show are not just women, or just white, or just gay, black, or mentally ill. Each woman speaks to the intersectionality inherent to one’s identity

Suzanne Warren, more popularly known as “Crazy Eyes,” for example, is a black woman adopted by white parents, is gay, and has psychological problems. While smart and raised in a suburban setting, it is revealed that she grew up an outsider because of her mental health, as if being a gay black woman would not be challenging enough. She and other inmates in the prison where the show takes place experience harassment and violence for their gender, sexuality, and skin color, at the hands of prison guards and other inmates alike.

Dynamic depictions of women parallel the dynamic lives of women in real life, whether those women be in prison or not. Like the characters in OITNB, we are all more than one thing, and our unique combinations of identity, particularly those on the wrong side of dominant culture (gender, sexuality, class, race), determine how we live our lives and what kind of discrimination, if any, we face.

[oliviaescribe]

Butler v. hooks, Paris is Burning

Judith Butler and bell hooks, two feminist theorists well known in academia, have conflicting opinions about the film Paris is Burning. hooks argues that some productions of male drag are misogynist because they imitate femaleness in a way that ridicules and degrades (Butler 385). hooks also writes that the film did little to elevate black gay men from a disenfranchised position. She writes, 

“in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, lie, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit” (hooks 149). 

For hooks, the drag balls in the film function as a stage for black gay men, who have already been victimized and marginalized by society, to worship and imitate their oppressors, particularly the ones bejeweled by capitalism and excess, which has never been on the side of those marginalized. 

Butler, on the other hand, argues that seeing drag as misogynistic is misguided because it puts heterosexuality in intrinsic place of superiority and forces the notion that queerness must be defined as the “other” to heterosexuality, not just a different representation of sexuality. She also argues that the performances at the balls in the film reinforce the performance of sexuality and gender. Butler writes, “The context (which we might read as a "Contesting of realness") involves the phantasmatic attempt to approximate realness, but it also exposes the norms that regulate realness as themselves phantasmatically instituted and sustained” (Butler 388). When gender and sexuality, in any form, is viewed as a performance, these performances are put on an even playing field and give no greater or lesser value to homosexuality or heterosexuality.

I’m more inclined to agree with Butler’s analysis of Paris is Burning, although bell hooks’ points are equally valuable. I believe that when these men perform in different ball categories, they are able to present themselves in a way they deem appropriate or entertaining. Either way, it reinforces the idea that everything we are and do is a performance of sorts, none intrinsically more wrong or right than another. 

[oliviaescribe]

Paris is Burning

The documentary Paris is Burning showcases the queer “ball” cultural scene in New York from the mid-80s into 1990. The film is a mix between footage of actual balls, which look a lot like fashion shows and runway performances, and personal interviews with well-known members of the African-American and Latin-American gay and transgender community. 

The balls serve as both a safe space for queer, racially marginalized people and an outlet for creative expression of those people. During the balls, participants strut down the center of the room in their chosen attire (anything ranging from Parisian Vogue-inspired clothing to Marine Corps blues), and may dance or otherwise get creative with their walk. Other people in this community watch from the sidelines, applauding the person’s performance, clothing, and general aesthetic.

There are several categories for ball fashion, including School Boy/Girl, BQ and FQ Realness (judged on participants' ability to blend in with male or female heterosexuals), European and American Runway, Best-Dressed, and Butch Queen Vogue. 

In her essay “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” Judith Butler writes how she is permanently troubled by identity categories, as she considers them to be “invariable stumbling-blocks” and understands them and promotes them as being “sites of necessary trouble” (225). Many individuals who consider themselves queer or LGBT, including Butler, feel this way about identity categories, feeling they can be instruments of “regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression” (224). 

So why do categories exist in ball culture? One could argue that the categories present at balls lay somewhere outside of identity categories and are more fashion than identity; it could also be argued that queering culture is taking the oppressive system within identity categories and subverting and redefining identity categories in a way that empowers these individuals. 

Perhaps the fact that this disenfranchised community is the one creating and defining these categories gives those performing inside these categories more power than if they were performing in categories they did not create, such as normalized gender expressions and sexualities. 

[oliviaescribe]

On Imitation and Gender Insubordination

“Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original” (230).

In “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” Judith Butler discusses the falseness of true or authentic gender. This idea is often discussed in terms of “gender vs sex,” where gender is the cultural construct (man or woman) and sex is the biological fact (male or female). When people perform gender (man, woman, non-binary, etc) they are imitating an idea of gender that doesn’t exist. Gender is not inherently tied to a person’s sex as gender and the things that make a man or woman are arbitrary. 

How different are men and women, really? The ways a person chooses to imitate their preferred gender decides those differences. 

Look at Phil and Lil above, fraternal twins from Nickelodeon’s Rugrats. Phil is male, Lil is female. The twins are essentially the same person: they share the same interests, wear very similar clothes, have the same hair and body shape, play with the same friends, and are even voiced by the same actor. The only thing that differentiates Phil and Lil is their dress; Lil wears pink shoes and a pink shirt underneath her skirt, while Phil wears blue shorts and blue shoes. Lil also has a bow in her hair while Phil does not. 

Phil and Lil share little to no character differences in the cartoon and the only way the viewer knows that they are male and female is how they’re referred to, their gendered names, and the differences in dress. These characteristics are used as a way to imitate binary gender, and it’s easy to understand who is a girl and who is a boy because of the implementation of culturally coded, gendered names and colors. If the twins didn’t imitate gender in a culturally dominant way, would it be possible to tell who was male/female, boy/girl? Short of taking off their diapers, obviously.