Since Mulvey published her pivotal essay in 1975, there have been numerous expanses on the subject of cinematic looking, who possesses power and ownership over recorded images, and the perspective the audience adopts when watching re-interpreted reality. Consequently the theories of gazing have been expanded into the minority studies and queer theory, as well as feminist studies. This should seem natural, as all three share the unique quality of being the other in regards to mainstream hegemony. While the sexuality of the subjects of Paris is Burning is predominantly homosexual, it also features transgendered subjects who are arguably straight, as well as genuine heterosexuals. But, in applying Monique Wittigs notions of homosexuality, in which is not only the desire for ones own sex. But it is also the desire for something else that is not connoted. This desire is resistance to the norm, one can see how Livingstons documentary approaches a further mitigated twice minoritized in being both queer and racial minorities.
Livingston approaches her subject matter from the perspective of an outsider. As she interviews noted drag performers Dorian Corey, Pepper LeBeija, and Venus Xtravaganza, Livingston lets them explain notable phrases or popular slang within in the community. It is easy enough to identify the constituent factors in the reputed subversiveness of ball culture . . . the demonstration of the mutability of identity -effected in particular through ball contestants achievement of Realness - that provides the requisite edge to the cultures sociopolitical significance. Complemented with strong white graphics on a black background, words like Shade, House, and Realness are also subverted, re-defined for the audienceoutsider by the subjects. The assumption that the viewer, who presumably has a passing knowledge of vogue culture thanks to the popularization of the dance by Madonna, still knows little about the intricacies of the culture that spawned a national craze indicates how far outside the mainstream the drag community lies. Common words have new definitions, often semantically reinterpreting the meaning in a campish, mocking way. (Sontag)
Some may argue that Paris is Burning merely documents the actions of real, living people, and thus cannot be supplemented with the same critique to the rest of narrative cinema. However, the stucture of the film is narrative in itself, it reviles in the story of voguing, and select ball walkersdancers who have seen the craze from the underground to the mainstream. In this, Livingston captures an elder drag queen transforming from masculine exterior to made up and fictious feminine counterpart. This alone would be a narrative in transformation, but it also reveals how the director is subject to redefining the passive subject to the explictly feminine, while reatining the control of being a genetic feminine form who, behind the camera, can observe and disemeber the subject, transforming them into a safe fantasy of a woman one, to a female director and passive audience, remains a safe, fictious woman.
Paris is Burning is further compounded by the subjects in the film, many of whom are critically influenced either by women in cinema or on the cover of magazines. Dorian Corey alludes to how even black cinema stars like Lena Horne were stigmatized by the queer community in her day, and how this stigma continues to exist. Another interviewee, Octavia St. Laurent, expresses dreams of becoming a fashion model like the ones plastered across her wall. Both demonstrate an interest in fantasy had been filtered through the gaze of the camera, both cinematic and photographic. In turn, they model themselves after women who are themselves not true women, but carictures of them created (presumadbly by men). They are both victim of what they assume women are to be like, perhaps because they are not aware of the gaze that transpires when these images of women were created. Pepper LaBeijas statement that he has never mistaken emulating a woman for being a woman creates an ironic juxtaposition with interviews of those queens with transsexual feelings. The viewer can not help but perceive some queens dreams as misguided and foolish when Pepper reminds, women get treated bad. They get beaten. Having a vagina doesnt mean youll have a fabulous life. It might in fact be worse. Neverthless, Livingston doesnt preceive these appraoches towards faux feminitiy with contempt or pity, she observes and reports. Her approach is with care and not objectification.
Thus the film, because of its subject matter and directors bias, even unintatnional, raises more questions about cross-racial and cross-genderal gazes. Yet, it does demonstrate a few instances to build upont the language of understanding the cinematic gaze and how the semeotics of cinema are constructed. Paris is Burning exposes how queerness falls in the social scale of objectivity. If Mulvey believed that to view was an activemasculine act, then Livingston can safely take on a heterosexual, yet active role in the filmmaking process as long as her subject matter takes on an exaggerated feminine role. Given that drag queens are more or less performers in character, and balls provide moments to act real as much as any documentary interview, it is difficult to venture where the performances begin or end. Still, to the audience, its perceivable that this subjugated area of society approachable through the filter of the female director, who in her is both white and adopts the masculineactive roll.
Never the less, the documentary successes in capturing queer men (and some transgendered women), as they reveal themselves, in segmented parts to the audience. While the drag queens, like Dorian Corey, are shown preparing for the stage, the film deconstructs the hidden notion of realness, and in many way conflates the questions of realness in the documentarians gaze. Because the film allows a woman to invert the power structure traditionally reserved for the activemasculine, the male subjects become the heterosexual object of desire for Livingston. Yet, similar to her male director counterparts who dismember the female body in narrative cinema, according to Mulvey, Livingston castrates the men in her film by both re-constructing the notion of drag and realness for the passive audience, while simultaneously relishing in her typically feminine subjects, some of whom literally transform when on stage, or camera.
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