Vogue

Paris is Burning, Pose, Madonna & a magazine

Jun 20, 2023

grayscale photo of a book — Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

I originally wanted to do a series on queer theory, gender-bending literature, and law & literature related to LGBTQIA+ issues for Pride Month — I will do it in the future! I’m working on a few other projects and also experimenting here. So this is a one off Tuesday Topic post, but I hope you enjoy it.

I guess this post could likewise fit into the parenting category of the last several weeks. If you’re not familiar with the film Paris is Burning, the main focus of today’s article, you’ll discover that it’s largely about creating alternative families.

Vogue, the word

The word vogue means something that is in fashion. But it has come to also mean a type of dancing or movement as well as to be synonymous with the fashion magazine.

The word comes from French where it also means “fashion” but also a type of “success” originally at least. The word comes from "drift, swaying motion (of a boat)" literally "a rowing," from Old French voguer "to row, sway, set sail" (15c.), not unlike the word vague, which means wave (like French New Wave cinema, or Nouvelle Vague). It makes sense that a word about the sea’s waves and rowing would be used for fashion, not only of clothing but anything that is at the peak of a wave. Furthermore, fashions come and go…and come again, much like the movement of waves.

Vogue magazine

For the 130th anniversary of Vogue magazine, the editors said this in retrospect:

Since its founding [in 1892], Vogue has never been just about the rise and fall of hemlines, but focused on cultural and societal shifts as well. For many years, the Vogue covers featured colorful “storytelling” pictures by leading illustrators that romanced “the woman of leisure” as she followed the sun, hit the slopes, and lived for the night. Once fashion photography was deemed an art circa the mid-1930s, the magazine began greeting its reader with stylized snaps of real-life beauties and professional models. Eventually it began showcasing actors (Cate Blanchett, Angelina Jolie, Lupita Nyong'o) and entertainers (Cher, Beyoncé, Rihanna)

Until magazines recently went largely online, Vogue also had a host of excellent writers. I used to suggest that many of my high school students look there for examples of great essays.

However, even in the words of Anna Wintour, “Vogue has become stale and predictable, and it has happened in spite of some of the best editors, writers and photographers in the business.” In “What’s Wrong With Vogue?,” Cathy Horyn of The New York Times explores what went wrong and comes up with the answer of web-based media.

I’ll be coming back to fashion in September, the month that Vogue’s September Issue coincides with the most important fashion shows of the year. Below is the trailer for the eponymous film and documentary that focuses as much as possible on the elusive Wintour. Additionally, other fashion documentaries may add for an interesting viewing list.

Paris is Burning and Ball Culture

Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning that captures the drag scene of 1980s New York City is an important film in cinematic and cultural studies history, one that many Pose television viewers were unaware of when they first encountered Ball Culture (and vogueing outside of Madonna’s realm) on screen.

The film is available on youtube.com with Spanish subtitles if you don’t have a method of watching. (Better to pay if you can find it that way, of course.)

Why is it important? The film is a celebration of a certain articulation of queerness and the way people can form new brothers, sisters, parents, and cousins after being rejected by their own families. The documentary allows people who participated in Ball Culture in 1980s NYC, particularly in Harlem, to articulate their own dreams and desires, as well as their traumas and the fears surrounding - especially - AIDS at that time.

The ball itself is important because it embodies that celebration. At the same time, it emphasizes the need to retreat to an interior, to a particular kind of space in order to celebrate. It is a kind of acting, yes, but one that I would argue asserts identity rather than denying authenticity.

If you were to look at academic journal databases, you would find a slew of articles focused mainly on this film, including:

The last article in the above list opens with a discussion of the way the subjects play with the idea of school, at once mocking it and yearning for it as a type of ultimate commodity:

In one of the universally ignored scenes from Jenny Livingston's 1 99 1 documentary Paris Is Burning, several subjects of the film perform the category "school." Like all categories performed in Paris, "school" puts the gender/race/class grid to work, demonstrating both the scriptedness and the uncanny, overwrought quality of a position which is incessantly naturalized in our daily media. For a few moments of the film, a young, androgynous, Hispanic male sports what is clearly a plain t-shirt, retrofit with letters that spell "YALE UNIVERSITY." The shoddiness of the imitation not only dramatizes how inescapably even consumer significations of "school" circulate out of the reach of the performers in the film - and thereby how much "school" is a project of (class) consumption - it also suggests the social overdeterminations of a category like "intelligence"; if one function of the school is to reward kinds of performance based on criteria of "merit," to produce intelligence and to reproduce conditions under which kinds of intelligence are recognized, then the uncanny faux t-shirt, worn in this context, reminds us that another function is to ameliorate social differences "coincidentally" described by race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. As Paris' performers suggest, "school" is a site of anxious performance, where the conditions of being "intelligent" run headlong into the social asymmetries reproduced by institutions of neoliberal nation-states.

It looks at the way the people of the film are constant outsiders, due to their sexuality, gender, race, class, and - here emphasized - education. The film is largely about access, or a lack thereof. But it likewise gives voices to the people Livingston gives screen-time to.

Just a couple years after the film finally aired (although filmed in the 80s), already several of the main characters had died - strangulation, heart attack…their lives were difficult. The NYT revisited what was going on already in 1993 with ‘drag’ more generally in relation to Ball Culture and the film:

Paris is no longer burning. It has burned. And not only because of the casualties. No one needs to go to a ball to see drag anymore: Dame Edna Everage has television specials, Ru Paul mugs on the covers of magazines, fashion shows feature drag acts on the runway. No one needs to go to a ball to see voguing either, not since Madonna gobbled it up, appropriating two Xtravaganzas in the process. Once mainstream America began to copy a subculture that was copying it, the subculture itself was no longer of interest to a wider audience, and whatever new opportunites existed for the principals dried up. After one show last year at the jazz club Sweetwaters, Octavia St. Laurent, for instance, returned to dancing behind glass at the Show Palace. And the balls, which had moved downtown in their moment of fame, have mostly moved back to Harlem.

More on Madonna in a moment, but for now, it’s interesting to look at the idea that a subculture’s fame could also lead to its erasure or at least correlate with it. The film’s success did not make the filmmaker “rich” but it did give her access to working on more films. Livingston understands her “privilege” despite being a female filmmaker as an educated, white artist.

Influence of Ball Culture and the film is also in the way we speak. As The Guardian investigated in 2015:

[Ball Culture’s] lexical influence is legion. As Daily Dot writer Mary Emily O’Hara pointed out: “If you’ve ever used words like ‘fierce’ or ‘shady’ or commented ‘yassss queen’ or ‘work’ on a cute Instagram pic, you’ve been speaking the language of the ball scene – likely, without ever realising where it came from.”

But even though Livingston attempted to give this voice to a subculture, the film is often met with rejection for using the participants despite the fact that the key ‘actors’ were paid against normal documentary journalistic practice. For example, a showing about ten years ago in Harlem was canceled:

Then a change.org petition was launched by the collective Paris is Burnt. It called for the cancellation of the event, blasted the film as an “anthropological foray into the lives of low-income TQPOC ballroom members”, and issued a list of demands to both the organisers and Livingston. The petition also drew a connection between the event’s all-white line-up and the rapid recent gentrification of Brooklyn: (“This is the appropriation of our narratives for the sake of entertaining a gentrifying, majority white audience that seeks to consume us and call it paying homage.”)

Perhaps if the event itself had included more authentic voices like those of the film, it would have been accepted. The only special guest was “Le Tigre’s JD Samson, a white, lesbian and genderqueer musician who has no connection to the ball scene.” Perhaps this goes back, then, to the issue of education and access. Who is put on stage? Who is given the camera? Although the Ball community was able to tell their story, it is all filtered through the lens and editing of Livingston. While her intentions may have been to support, celebrate, and also expose injustice, would it have been better told from within the community or did her lens create enough distance to share the story in a more meaningful way? We need an alternative telling to understand the difference in impact.

Pose TV show

During the pandemic, along came a fictional television show on the same subject called Pose (2018-21). Although “‘Pose’ co-executive producer, writer, and director Janet Mock said ‘Pose’ would never reference ‘Paris Is Burning,’ since the two projects exits in ‘parallel universes’” many have noted that several of the characters have striking resemblances and storylines to the original film. Perhaps it was unavoidable…

Despite the insistence of its distinction from the film, the television’s creators discuss their love of the original. Janet Mock, for example, who describes herself as a trans woman of color but an individual who doesn’t speak for others explains how one might both find it a powerful and problematic film:

To me, “Paris Is Burning” is such a gift in the sense that it introduced me to a world and to people who were very much like me. I saw it when I was in high school at my friend’s house on VHS and it was powerful to be introduced to Octavia, to Venus, and to Corey. And for me, I think it’s a gift that [Jennie Livingston] was there at the time, because we know that many of those people are not here today. The remaining survivors are very much involved on our series. Yeah, there’s a complicatedness of whose gaze? Who controls the camera, who’s behind it?

Madonna and Vogueing

Both the film and television show bring us back to Madonna and the song and dance of Vogue that came out the same year as Livingston’s documentary.

For a bit of background, you can look at the FT’s Life of a Song on this hit. I love that series. Many forget that although Madonna is a hugely successful (and rich) (white) woman, she started out with a lot less: “Madonna found a surrogate family in the queer dance scene when she dropped out of college to move to New York in 1978. She was still a teenager when she left her native Michigan with, she says, $35 in her pocket.”

Still, many argue that vogueing wasn’t hers for the taking. Was Madonna’s song ‘accepted’ cultural appropriation?

In “The Historic, Mainstream Appropriation of Ballroom Culture,” them magazine investigates this topic and includes links to more recent documentaries about Ball Culture. The article goes through historical references to Vogue and considers both the integrity of Madonna’s dance and production’s influence by ‘real’ voguers as well as her appropriation of it:

Madonna released her single “Vogue,” on March 27, 1990. The video, directed by David Fincher, features voguers José Gutierez Xtravaganza and Luis Camacho Xtravaganza (among others), who also choreographed it. Considered by many critics to be one of the best music videos of all time, the video and song brought voguing into mainstream culture more than it ever had been, but Madonna’s work was not without its flaws. Madonna was and has since been accused of cultural appropriation for the track — all the celebrities the singer mentions in the song are white — while also erasing voguing’s original context as a creation of queer people of color. And because Madonna, an ever-changing pop singer, made the song, voguing was largely dismissed as a fad. While some in ball culture paid this no mind — they had always vogued and were going to continue doing so no matter the mainstream’s opinion — the singer was minting money off of a culture she had only just been introduced to, while many in that culture still struggled.

It’s a complicated scenario and one even more complex based on the mixed reactions from different communities, including those who consider themselves a part of Ball Culture. Madonna continues to have a strong support from the LGBTQIA+ community and vice versa as an advocate.

Here’s a nuanced consideration from Fandsided:

When you look back at the situation, though, is Madonna the one to blame? It’s a complicated case of cultural appropriation where the artist seemingly took all the appropriate steps, she appreciated the culture and made sure to give credit where credit is due. After all, she was inspired by the ball scene itself, she worked with two dancers from the scene, hired them for the video and even brought them on tour with her. But does that make it right, and if not, how could she have navigated that situation differently?

Or did it “help catapult a subculture into the mainstream” as the FT posited in 2022 on their Life of a Song column:

“Voguing feels both like precision and letting go. It’s like flying,” says Ricky Tucker, author of new book And the Category Is… Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community. In his “love letter” to the exuberant black and Latinx LGBT+ drag subculture that began in the Harlem ballroom scene in the 1980s, Tucker says that — like many queer music lovers — he was first turned on to a liberating scene by Madonna’s 1990 hit: “Vogue”. Others in the LGBT+ community remain angry that a straight white woman commercialised and in their view kitschified their culture.
…
Ricky Tucker believes it’s OK for queer fans to feel simultaneously empowered and exploited by the song. “I would be wasting my time if I were looking for evidence as to whether or not Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ was good or bad,” he says. “It’s more complicated than that.”

So, yeah, the answer is not black and white, as one might expect. Historically, it’s happened: the song, the subculture, the film, the television show, and all the narratives that surround them coexist. I would posit that it makes more sense to consider their impact now and what it means for communities, language, gender, music, unbiased journalism, and more. I guess that’s why Paris is Burning remains an academic hot topic and is often used in course syllabi.

Tell us what you think or add in texts you think we should see. Here’s a link to a recent NYT article about the term “Mother” and its origins in ball culture [paywall].

Thanks for reading and thinking!

Starting next week, for our summer term, I’ll be sending you a series of Summer Travel, kicking off with a podcast conversation next week. My family and I are off to the south of France soon where I’m eager to immerse myself in the language, food, and fashions. I hope you’ll be able to take a break this summer, even if it is in the after work hours by a swimming pool. And for those in the southern hemisphere, I’m a little jealous you’re at the start of your ski and snow-viewing season!