The Harlem Drag Culture :: History Culture Cultural Essays

The Harlem Drag Culture Foucault, Moraga, Fuss, hooks, Butler. These authors, along with many more, have concerned themselves with the defining of categories. In reading these authors our class has, upon every occasion of meeting, discussed the formation of categories. What we have discovered, in part, is that things are not defined by what they are, but by what they are not. Diana Fuss, in her article "Inside/Out," states "any identity is founded relationally, constituted in reference to an exterior or outside that defines the subject's own interior boundaries and corporeal surfaces" (Fuss, "Inside/Out," 234). A common example of this, derived from Freud, is that males are defined by their having a penis, while females are defined by their lack of one. Defining identity is not necessarily so binary. As Cherrà ­e Moraga puts it "Call me something meant to set me apart from you and I will know who I am" (Moraga, "The Breakdown of the Bicultural Mind," 237). The subcultures of American society, cultures that are not part of the white patriarchy, are defined by how they differ from this white patriarchy. Our class was privileged to be introduced to one subculture found in Harlem during the late 1980s through the documentary Paris is Burning by Jennie Livingston (1992). This documentary captured the lives of men who lived outside the dominant culture. They had several strikes against them: they were Latino and African American, they were homosexual, and many of them were poor, sometimes even homeless. These men came together to form a kinship network, in the form of houses, to protect and support one another. Out of this milieu developed drag balls, balls in which the men dressed up and competed in different categories, such as "executive," "realness," and "voguing." The object of most of these categories was to mimic dominant society by looking like the heterogeneous members of the white patriarchy. After watching Paris is Burning, reading critiques of it, listening to class discussions, and processing through my own thoughts about the film that I have come to struggle with an extremely large tension I am confronted with in thinking about the drag ball subculture of Harlem. Is the mimicking of dominant society by this culture a way of subverting it or is it supporting and perpetuating the white patriarchal ideal? Do these men redefine dominant society in their own terms and take control of it?