Got to be Real: Examining the Body as Text in Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning

Can the body be capable of both speaking for itself and being read as a text? Through words, appearances, actions, and dances, the human body both expresses its context and speaks independently from it. By existing in and outside of time and space, the body communicates through multitudes and contradictions and this is what Jennie Livingston examines in her 1990 documentary, Paris is Burning. The film serves as a time capsule of Black and brown ballroom culture in the late 80s. Trans women walk regally and gay men vogue expressively in New York City against the backdrop of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, racism, homophobia, transphobia, poverty, and drug addiction associated. Paris is Burning embraces this context and offers the powerful perspectives of those living and actively creating this subculture. The ballrooms of Harlem become the stage for expression, with its actors draped in expensive silks and chiffon. The underground ballroom scene both affirms and critiques Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Drag queens, trans-femme women, and gay men actively and passively perform gender. When using an intersectional lens, it’s crucial to acknowledge how in and outside the ballroom scene, the performance of their gender, or a gender, is vital to their authenticity and physical safety.

The documentary depicts the way physical spaces must be negotiated by queer bodies. Much of the film is set in private spaces like the Harlem ballrooms, dressing rooms, and inside people’s homes. Physical space is essential to Judith Butler’s definition of gender, who writes in Gender Trouble, “gender is an identity…instituted in an exterior space” (Butler 179). When queer Black and brown bodies are so heavily policed in “exterior spaces”, unregulated third spaces become essential and revolutionary. David Xtravaganza, father of the house of Xtravaganza describes the freedom of the balls early in the documentary, saying, “It's like crossing into the looking glass. Wonderland. You go in there and you feel, you feel 100% right” (PIB 0:04:50). Expressing how the ballroom space feels “100% right” suggests that everywhere else, queer people feel they are wrong, they are able to feel their greatest freedom in the highly performative spaces of the ballroom. At the height of the AIDS crisis in New York, queer people, specifically poor queer Black and brown people were disproportionately dying, being neglected at the hands of the homophobic state. In 1990, the HIV/AIDs death rate for Black men between the ages of 25 to 44 was three times the rate for white men (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). At the intersection of being, poor, queer, and Black or brown, meant being heavily policed and dismissed--their bodies were considered to be dangerous and unmanageable. Thus, the ballrooms which celebrate and reward the beauty of queer aesthetics and bodies, become the antithesis to hospital wards and mass gravesites, where freedom, acceptance and life are celebrated.

The relationship between the body and space is also inseparable from time--where the visibility of gender shifts. Livingston occasionally inserts scenes of Fifth Avenue during the day, but instead of depicting the queer Black and brown subjects of the film, she features white businesspeople and families. During the day queer bodies become fully visible and vulnerable and they are ridiculed for failing to align with the societal “stylized repetition of acts” that compose gender (Butler 179). But at night, when those dogmas lose their definition, a safety emerges for those who do not easily fit within the restrictive binaries of gender, class, and race--that often prioritize white, rich, male bodies. In the opening scene, Pepper LaBeija, mother of the House of LaBeija, struts down a dark street in a gold dress with exaggerated sequined shoulders, a tiered train, and a feathered headpiece. The silence of the street is amplified by the grandeur of her presence. “They have to open the door” Pepper tells two men, “Y’all have to open that door too” (PIB 0:02:06). Her dress won’t fit through just one door. Anywhere else, at any other time, poor queer Black and brown bodies are taught to be small and take up as little space as possible. But at night, at the Savoy Ballroom, Pepper LaBeija demands space, to the point that she needs two doors open to encompass her vastness. Upon her grand entrance through the doors, into the ballroom, she is enthusiastically welcomed with a loud applause from her community--to be seen and to be fully acknowledged further demonstrates the power of ballroom.

A core element of the balls in Paris is Burning, is the complex categorization practices which reveal the futility of rigid binaries. Some categories allude to the unattainable. The category ‘Executive Realness’ asks performers to dress up and embody Wall Street professionals to challenge barriers of class, race, and gender that exclude them from this world of wealth and privilege. On the runway, they perform a life that is otherwise inaccessible to them. By manipulating their movement and putting on a suit and tie--they turn the aesthetics of Wall Street (the epitome of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy) into a performance and an opportunity to imagine access into this world. As Dorian Corey puts it, “If I had the opportunity, I could be one because I can look like one” (PIB 0:15:27). These categories, in a Butlerian sense, challenge how the absolute truths attached to language are often self-actualized. There is no inherent truth to what it means to be an “executive businessman,” other than the superficial meaning society fixes to that character. In other categories like ‘High Fashion Winter Sportswear: Catskills vs. Poconos’ or ‘Ivy League School Boy Realness’, performers further play with these class identities that are inaccessible to poor queer Black and brown people. These identities are marked by their exclusion and in ballroom--their power and meaning is, for brief moments on the runway, accessible to the performers.

Inside the ballrooms, performers are able to experiment with the infinite possibilities of their appearance to briefly inhabit these identities. Outside of the ballroom space, power demands a singular and legible identity to people, thus, queer people must perform “realness” in a world that otherwise fails to see them. In Paris is Burning, when the concept of realness is introduced, a montage of men and women on Fifth Avenue is shown, as Cheryl Lynn’s song “Got to be Real” plays. The lyrics of this song are notable as Lynn repeats the line “To be real” throughout the chorus. The verb “be” suggests that realness or authenticity is an action to demonstrate. One isn’t automatically real, but rather, must constantly act out their realness. As Judith Butler argues, the language used to define gender gives gender its meaning. Known as a “performative utterance” (Austin 4), by naming oneself as a man or a woman, society begins creating and fixing meaning to these socially constructed categories. By creating categories of ‘realness’, ballroom culture demonstrates the futility of gender. The concept of realness offers more nuance. When a poor gay Black man walks down the street, his safety and social standing depend on his ability to perform his heterosexuality--which is deeply intertwined with the performance of his masculinity. With stiff joints, puffed shoulders, and a stern facial expression, the body becomes a text and can be ‘read’ as heterosexual. To challenge Butler, this performativity is not unconscious, but rather, a very active, life affirming performance. For queer Black and brown people, their bodies are not only culturally policed by Butler’s theory of the societal reproduction of gender, they are also physically policed by the state. LGBTQ youth of color are disproportionally represented in America’s juvenile justice systems. A 2015 study found that 20% of youth in the juvenile justice system identify as LGBTQ, despite only making up around 6% of the U.S. youth population (Irvine 6).

For trans women, intersectional oppression makes their performance of “realness” even more vital to their livelihood. Black and brown trans women die at exceedingly high rates. Between 2013-2020 the Human Rights Campaign reported the murder of more than 200 transgender Americans – a likely undercount due to police and medical misgendering (Human Rights Campaign, 2020). This epidemic of violence exceedingly targets transwomen of color, who constitute four out of five of all anti-transgender murders. Along with their queerness, they face the intersectional oppression of being women. To pass and be real is to be safe from the layered violence imposed by “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks 38). As Dorian Corey bluntly puts it, femme realness queens “can walk out of that ballroom into the sunlight and onto the subway and get home and still have all their clothes and no blood running off their bodies” (PIB 0:22:31). This quote is predictive of Venus Xtravaganza’s fate at the end of the documentary, who is found strangled under a hotel bed. It is no coincidence that Venus, a trans woman, ends up murdered, whereas a gay man, like Willi Ninja, ends up with international recognition and fame. Ostracism and violence often acts to exclude trans people from the traditional labor market. As a result, poor trans women in this time often had no other choice but sex work, putting them at immense risk of misogynistic violence. Venus’s death shows the consequences of performing gender, revealing the violence that results in one’s inability to sync the truth of the body with another's reading of that body.

Through the shapes and movements of Voguing, dancers explore how one can make the body as communicative as possible. Voguing, named after the fashion magazine, is an improvisational and competitive dance that originated on the Christopher Street Piers of the West Village and the Harlem balls. Willi Ninja, a focus in the film and mother of the House of Ninja, is often cited as the father of Vogue. A notable scene depicts him in Washington Square Park, outlined by sunlight as he vogues next to a tree. In a voiceover, he describes one of his signature moves where he pantomimes a compact mirror with his palms. He imagines turning the compact mirror to his opponent, as if saying, “what they have on their face right now needs a dramatic makeup job” (PIB 0:37:38). With such ease, Willi says so much with his body. With this compact mirror, he brings the inside outside. By confronting the outside world with an imaginary compact mirror, he forces the audience to reevaluate their ‘realness’ or authenticity. Vogue asks, how can the body be taken to its extreme--how in distorting the conventional body, the gendered body can begin to reimagine the possibilities of the self.

To strike a pose is to give shape to oneself, commanding autonomy over one’s body and one’s life story. With every beat, Willi Ninja and his peers strike a new angular shape. He describes taking inspiration from the model’s poses in fashion magazines, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and gymnastics. These poses thus exist in relationships to time and history. As Judith Butler writes, “gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time” (Butler 179). With their bodies, dancers embody, respect, and subvert time. The modern masculine body is ascribed to specific ranges of movement—a general inflexibility and flatness. Vogue is the opposite, movements show extreme flexibility and complex movement in an athletic way. Vogue reimagines the multitudes that the body can encompass, moving in all dimensions. The hieroglyphic nature of Vogue also places it in context to ancient African history, perhaps also in context to an ancient divine masculine. Like the poses in fashion magazines, dancers freeze time in their shapes. By taking the photographic objectification of the queer Black body to the extreme, a pose with every beat, they reclaim the power to define their bodies while also calling out the fixed definitions attached to the gendered body. Slithering on the ground in a dip (PIB 1:05:58) or the limp wrists in a catwalk (PIB 0:12:47) stand in direct opposition to movement expectations of cisgender heterosexual men who are conditioned to be rigid and one dimensional. Vogue is a transgressive practice that works to expand the dimensions of how the body can move and create shapes.

Filmed 30 years ago, Paris is Burning remains a timeless portrayal of the radical art and storytelling that emerges under repression and violence. The individuals and community of the ballroom scene are a reminder of the full range of human expression. Despite living in a world that constantly denies the humanity of anyone that exists outside the binary, revolutionaries like Dorian Corey and Willi Ninja, in the most human way, push upon boundaries of identity. Through the use of the physical body as a medium of communication, performers, drag queens, and voguers are able to devour and disrupt the very systems of power that seek to quell them. Without ignoring the Black queer context of this proposal, one must imagine the sheer possibility that emerges when the body can both speak for itself and be read as a text to tell a completely different story. How much violence and pain can be avoided if bodies are allowed to express their soul freely, without fear? When one can freely be themselves, what new possibilities of existence can arise in the collective human story?

Works Cited

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Harvard University Press, 1962.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. Routledge, 1993.

“Mortality Attributable to HIV Infection/AIDS among Persons Aged 25-44 Years -- United States, 1990, 1991.” July 2, 1993. www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00021017.htm.

Hall, Stuart, and Media Education Foundation. Representation & the Media. Edited by Sanjay Talreja and Mary Patierno. Directed by Sut Jhally. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation. 1997.

Hooks, Bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Atria Books, 2004.

Human Rights Campaign. Gender diversity in the workplace: A transgender & non-binary toolkit for employers (pp. 1–73). The Human Rights Campaign Foundation. 2020. https://www.hrc.org/news/transforming-policies-to-practice-a-new-toolkit-to-promote-transgender-incl

Irvine, Angela, and Aisha Canfield. The Overrepresentation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Questioning, Gender Nonconforming and Transgender Youth within the Child Welfare to Juvenile Justice Crossover Population. Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, vol. 24, no. 2, 2016.

Livingston, Jennie. Paris Is Burning. Off White Productions Inc., 1990.