Additionally, after Judith Butler’s influential essay “Gender is Burning” linked Paris is Burning to the academic discipline of Queer Theory, the film and its subjects have all too often been conflated with a discipline that is erroneously assumed to be wholly incompatible with Marxist politics.[25] [open endnotes in new window] There’s an irony here—after all, what the film literally documents are trans and queer ballroom performers stealing high-priced clothing and accessories in order to construct a counterculture that was distinct from the surrounding society—though of course, no counterculture can ever be entirely outside of the culture it opposes. As Ferguson notes, since culture “fosters both identifications and antagonisms, culture becomes a site of material struggle,” with the result that queer of color culture is oriented simultaneously toward and against capitalism, producing “unimagined alliances.”[26] Furthermore, Marxist thought plays a significant role in queer of color critique, including Chandan Reddy’s analysis of Paris is Burning. As Reddy points out, the performers featured in Paris is Burning give voice to a critique of the system that excludes them, assessing its inequality and injustice at the same time that they find themselves also interpellated by it.[27] Nonetheless, other critics have described many aspects of the film as indications of capitalist complicity, as I will detail. This ranges from the ballroom practices that the film documents, such as walking categories and striving for “realness,” to the content of the intimate interviews where the documentary’s subjects express their longing for safety, security, wealth, and belonging.

Filmed during the late 1980s, Paris is Burning captures a record of ballroom culture in New York City through direct observational documentary, cinema verité on-the-street conversations, and talking head interviews. Formally, the film invites a number of important critiques. In Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), bell hooks points out that Livingston herself never appears in the film, obscuring the racialized power dynamics that shape the film’s ethnographic gaze.[28] As Jay Prosser notes, the low-budget documentary was made possible in part by the fact that Livingston didn’t pay the film’s participants for their time, labor, and expertise. In fact, the sequence that discusses Venus Xtravaganza’s murder elides that information even as it presents Venus Xtravaganza’s death as the inevitable outcome of the extreme precarity and poverty that required her to engage in survival sex work.[29]

Reflected in three different mirrors, Venus Xtravaganza does her hair while a voiceover from Dorian Corey explains the pervasive threat of violence that trans femme people face and how “realness” can be a matter of survival: “When they’re undetectable, when they 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--those are the femme realest queens.”

In this sequence, which is shot at night near the piers before Venus Xtravaganza goes on a midnight date with a client, she observes to the camera that her escort work is analogous to the situation of suburban housewives, explaining: “If you’re married, a woman, in a suburb, a regular woman who is married to her husband, and she wants him to buy her a washer and dryer set—in order for him to buy that, I’m sure she’d have to go to bed with him anyway to give him what he wants for her to get what so wants. So, in the long run, it all ends up the same way.”

However, most of the discourse about the film isn’t about its ethics or the way it mediates the pro-filmic reality it depicts. Instead, perhaps because of its documentary approach, critics focus on the actions and ideas of the people within the film, as if Paris is Burning offered direct and unmediated access to the full reality of these individuals’ lives, experiences, and situated knowledge. Furthermore, critics seem to expect a fully formulated, radical political analysis from the film’s participants, and they appear disappointed when they encounter casual conversation and joyously messy cultural practices. As a result, ballroom traditions like walking categories, which involve performing stereotypes of white dominant culture, are regarded as wholly uncritical aspirational practices while interview responses that describe a desire for safety and happiness are presented as capitalist capitulation. These reductive ideas have been deconstructed, but many students first encounter the film framed by classic essays by bell hooks and Judith Butler that advance such claims. Although hooks criticizes Livingston’s filmmaking decisions, her political critique is also pointedly aimed at the Black queer community, especially trans feminine people, who she collapses into the category of “gay men.” She writes:

“much of the tragedy and sadness of this film is evoked by the willingness of black gay men to knock themselves out imitating a ruling-class culture and power elite that is one of the primary agents of the their oppression and exploitation.”[30]

Discussing ballroom pageantry, hooks criticizes ballroom performers for upholding white femininity as the ideal, even though she also acknowledges that performers like Dorian Corey voice their own critical analysis of how white femininity is centered—within ballroom culture and within the world at large.[31] Meanwhile, in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), Judith Butler presents Xtravaganza’s death as an illustration of the psychoanalytic concept that all subjects are alienated without attending to the specific conditions of violence trans women face.[32] As Mari Ruti writes, such a move is common in queer theory and dangerously confuses  a universal “constitutive lack” with contingent and socially-constructed oppression.[33]

To some extent, of course, the documentary subjects of Paris is Burning do reinforce hegemonic ideas about “the good life.” But obviously, the same criticisms could be made about much of the media and most of the people who exist within white supremacist, heterosexist, cissexist, and patriarchal capitalism. Moreover, as Reddy argues, the subculture documented by Paris is Burning doesn’t smoothly replicate capitalist ideology; instead, that subculture constructs opportunities for those participating in it to be in conversation with the “contradictory demands and conditions” of the society that has rejected them.[34] Reddy finds political potential in the “confusion” generated by the resulting

“cultural formations that fail to separate cultural productions from material circumstances and political representation, producing powerful confusions of culture, politics, and economic circumstances that engender contradictory subjectivities.”[35]

Clearly, these dialectical exchanges are confusing, messy, and certainly not ideologically pure. As Julia Serrano points out, academics tend to expect trans and queer people to articulate a uniquely radical politics, and often appear disappointed when this expectation isn’t fulfilled.[36] In particular, academia has long positioned trans feminine people as figures for something other than themselves, as Emma Heaney argues in her analysis of the “trans feminine allegory” in fields including queer theory.[37] But these academic approaches aren’t sufficiently attentive to the specificity of trans subjects’ experiences.

Through examining trans people’s lived experiences, it becomes possible to understand how trans subjects are creative and knowledgeable political actors who are aware of the material conditions that shape their lives—and their practices of survival and resistance. Analyzing Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied (1989), another New Queer Cinema documentary which represents Black drag culture, Ferguson attends closely to the physical movement and gesture of a Black drag queen, writing that we can see in her way of being a “hint of pleasure and alrightness” that produces “a critique of commonplace interpretations of her life.” In this reading, she is neither wholly subsumed into “a tangle of pathologies and misfortunes” nor duped by the society that oppresses her, for Ferguson demonstrates that the scene conveys her knowledge of her conditions, including the source of her oppression—which is systemic.[38]

Along similar lines, Steedman provides a way to analyze the political implications of statements that are not necessarily intended to articulate a coherent political program, but which implicitly illuminate the oppressive conditions that the speaker experiences. In Steedman’s work, the point is not to conduct a political critique of the individual expressing longing, especially for seemingly frivolous and femininized things like fashionable clothing. Instead, these statements illuminate material conditions, and allow scholars to interrogate “the structures of political thought that have labelled this wanting as wrong.”[39] Steedman argues that political analysis too often neglects the economic and social significance of fashion, framing it as trivial. Yet impoverished subjects, especially women and those who are feminine, recognize its material importance, including how clothing can be a tool for those who are oppressed as they manage their actual conditions and try to survive.[40]

It’s here that I want to return to the scene from Pose of Angel at the ball. She’s walking the category “femme queen runway,” which describes a fantasy life that is perhaps within her grasp, after the audition she just completed with a modeling agency. Crucially, however, the audition itself is shot quite differently from Angel’s ballroom performance, and this contrast contributes to my materialist trans feminist reading of the ballroom scene. In the interview, the close-ups of Angel primarily show her as if through a video camera. The image is 4:3, low-resolution, time-stamped with the date, and it emphasizes that Angel is in a position of supplication here, appealing to the powerful. The reverse shots of the head of the modeling agency are 16:9 and high resolution, conveying the beauty, sophistication, and polish of the world that Angel desires to enter. These formal choices shape the scene, which immediately precedes Angel’s triumph at the ball. Instead of reading Angel’s performance at the ball as her attempt to enter the fashion industry and to participate in modeling’s problematic structures, the episode makes the distinctions between the ball and the audition quite clear. One is a necessary hurdle where Angel must ask to be allowed into a career that would enable her to support herself and her chosen family. The other is a space of community, celebration, performance, glitter, competition, conflict, and love that stages the power and the peril of white supremacist capitalism in the name of something else.

Although Steedman is discussing working-class British women in the mid-twentieth century, her description of how a politics of envy can mobilize a political relationship to stereotypes and ideals could easily apply to the ballrooms of 1980s New York City when she writes:

“with what creativity people may use the stuff of cultural and social stereotype, so that it becomes not a series of labels applied from outside a situation, but a set of metaphors ready for transformation by those who are its subjects.”[41]

In the ballroom scene, white supremacist, patriarchal, hetero- and cis-sexist capitalism is not absent, but the violence of its standards, barriers, and boundaries are being worked on and worked over to produce a space that contributes to trans and queer survival. As the scene shifts into slow motion, and the triumphant Angel spins in the spotlight, with glittering tickertape floating around her, we see the worldbuilding potential of queer performance spaces—alternative worlds that we can glimpse in such moments of celebration and joy.[42]

Across the remainder of the series (to date), the contrast between the ballroom world and the modeling world continues to be starkly marked, both in the image and in the narrative. Repeatedly, Angel faces the reality of her marginalization, exclusion, and objectification amid her commercial success. Pose juxtaposes these challenges with the distinct interpersonal challenges of ballroom culture, demonstrating Reddy’s argument that one world cannot be reduced to a mere imitation of—or capitulation to—the other. Similar dynamics emerge in other characters’ storylines. These juxtapositions work to reveal the horrors of the white supremacist, capitalist system. They are able to do so through representing the violence within dominant culture, rather than by presenting dominant culture through its own mythologization of itself.

Reading Pose as a commentary on Paris is Burning draws attention to how the earlier documentary juxtaposed scenes of the balls against shots of white, straight, cisgender people walking down the street, capturing dominant culture only in its most acceptable self-presentation. Rather than exposing its horrors, the rhetorical point is merely to suggest that these “normal” people are also performing their identities. Although this is an important insight into the performativity of identity, the formal effect of juxtaposition ultimately centers the dominant culture because it avoids revealing the violence that sustains hegemonic society when it presents the counterculture as a mere facsimile of it—useful only to produce a rhetorical effect. As a result, this universalizing gesture positions the balls as an example of a general condition rather than as a countercultural tactic for surviving and thriving.

Paris is Burning contrasts these images with the ballroom sequences to reveal that white, wealthy people also must work hard to approximate socially constructed “categories.” Almost comical in their banality, the carefully chosen street scenes of normative society affirm the keen social analysis that ballroom performers produce through constructing, performing, and evaluating the categories.

This, ultimately, is the real risk of the capitalist complicity approach: it flattens the distinctions between what power expresses and the way oppressed people express their oppression by power. While I have examined only a few minutes of Pose in detail, I hope that I have demonstrated how a materialist trans feminist approach to trans cultural production opens up crucial questions that are foreclosed by the capitalist complicity approach. In the end, expressions of desire, longing, and envy point to the problem—not the solution. They articulate the lived experiences, material conditions, and class consciousness of those exploited and excluded from the beauty, success, pleasure, and luxury they see around them. Through responding to their critique of what is, we can begin to imagine that, as the protest chant tells us, “another world is possible.”