Everyone's seen Paris is Burning, right? No? See me after class - I'll lend you a copy.


Image from Paris is Burning, 1991.

The film, by Jennie Livingstone, was made in 1991, and is an in-depth examination of ball culture in the US - which is to say, of drag competitions in ghetto communities. It's a real celebration of this fabulous, flamboyant and fascinating subculture, and for the past fifteen years has been the text used to open up discussion of Judith Butler's ideas of gendered perfomativity. For what it's worth, I find it an interesting choice of text given Butler's resistance to readings of performativity which privilege drag over other, everyday instances of sexed, gendered performances of identity - but that's a discussion for another day.

The fact that the movie is still being shown in classrooms should give you some indication of its quality - to be clear, I'm not talking about the quality associated with, say, watching The Land Before Time VIII during rainy lunchtimes at primary school. It is a very, very good film. However, it tends to assume this strange, archival status; the fact that the film is fifteen years old and still being shown suggests that the culture it documents no longer exists, or at least not in its original form. My understanding of ball culture - garnered from this film and the popular and critical body of work surrounding it - had led me to believe that it was a fairly isolated (in both time and space) phenomenon; a great pity, given how much fun it is to watch, and how much fun I suspect it would be to participate.


Contemporary ball culture.

You can imagine my delight, then, at coming across this article on the New York Times site this afternoon between classes.

Beats reading postcolonial theory - even if it was livened up today by the discussion of Pauline Pantsdown. Remind me sometime to come back and talk about drag and the politics of performance.