In the wake of onrushing ecological crises, riddled with an urgency seemingly irreconcilable with our temporalities, how might we cultivate curatorial and artistic practices that resist the coloniality of the Anthropocene’s self-mythologisation? With every fiber of our being intertwined in webs of processes that require repatterning, this time of precarity urges us to undertake the daunting task of a collective recuperation at the intersection of myriad disciplines, one that resists capitulating to humanist paradigms. Just as contemporary scholars appeared to reach a consensus that problematized the human exceptionalism of modern humanism, we were confronted by the indelibly marked presence of the human on Earth, and swiftly ushered in the so-called geological epoch of the Anthropocene. If, in the Enlightenment intellectual tradition, human exceptionalism was envisaged as the vehicle for progressive transformation in the world, the centrality of the human as Earth’s single sovereign in Anthropocentric thought lies in a regressive transformation of unprecedented ecological decline (Conty, 2016, p. 19). It is against this universalizing disavowal of differentiated responsibility that various alternative strands of political ecology have been forged. Sharing the common denominator of post-anthropocentrism, these stances have prompted a wider conversation on the material-discursive possibilities of curatorial and artistic practices within the framework of ecological thinking, which functions as both a thinking and a doing. 

In particular, this essay will examine the recent emergence of new materialisms- Bruno Latour’s formulation, to be precise- as a theoretical point of departure for ecologically-minded intellectual practices, using Anselm Franke’s exhibition Animism and Jimmie Durham’s work as its case studies. Described as an “ontological reconceptualization of the material world” (Benson, 2019 p. 253), new materialism problematizes what Latour termed ‘the Great Divide’- the nature/culture dualism that authorized the capitalist imperative to own and control nature (1993, p. 99). It therefore holds that the fault of humanism originates in its denial of nonhuman agency, inviting a dialogue amongst a wider host of agents within “an enlarged democracy”. The revolutionary character of such a recognition lies in its adoption of decolonial thought in considerations of ecology, destabilizing the discursive foundations of colonialism upon which the Anthropocene has been theorized. What is striking, however, is that after some thirty years of postcolonial critique, there has been relatively little engagement between new materialist philosophy and Indigenous scholarship. Once we take into account long-standing Indigenous traditions of agent ontologies, the putative ‘new’ in ‘new materialisms’ instantiates a European developmental schema that stymies the radicality of a project that seeks to dismantle precisely the coloniality of European modernity. Drawing on Jessica Horton and Janet Berlo, I will then discuss the difficulty in incorporating new materialisms with Indigenous ontologies, and subsequently underscore the risk posed by the absence of this reciprocal engagement: the reproduction of settler colonial practices of extraction and ultimately a recolonization of indigeneity. To conclude, I will posit that, if the radicality of new materialisms is located in its ability to act as a mirror, turning the European colonial gaze ascribed to ‘primitive’ societies back onto the ‘moderns’, as demonstrated by Animism, it is impeded by its denial of an Indigenous critique on its own terms by relegating it to a deconstruction of the foundational binaries of Europe. Short-circuiting this Eurocentric gaze is the Indigenous artists whose practices, while located in a shared contemporary landscape, mobilise materiality as a bridge instead of a mirror, imaging a mutually affecting terrain of equal agents. 

From the ancient Greek anthropos, human, and kainos, new, the term Anthropocene was popularized by Paul Crutzen in 2000 to describe our current geological epoch, wherein humans have become the primary determinants of transformation upon Earth. In one era, we have single-handedly charted the course of our planetary future in which “the impact of current human activities is projected to last over very long periods” (Crutzen, 2002). The primary point of contention with the term Anthropocene is betrayed by its etymological roots; the prefix anthropo- secures the centrality of ‘mankind’ as the singular driver of this entire epoch, “a tragic story with only one real actor” (Haraway, 2016, p.39). For all its universalizing talk of “humankind”, the Anthropocene signals a planetary crisis engendered by the activities of a population far narrower than ‘humankind’ might suggest (Grear, 2017, p.2). By envisaging causality through the narrative of an undifferentiated species agent, this is an epoch which serves as an extension of a Eurocentric developmentalist timeline that locates its foundations in the Enlightenment, rationalised through the same dualisms that have permitted the exercise of colonial power. That is, the superspecies designation of anthropos reproduces the same logocentric oppositions- the nature/culture divide- so central to Enlightenment humanist thought, authorising humankind’s imperatives to act upon rather than to interact with nature. It at once relegates nature to a non-agential domain and humankind to a unidirectional force, eschewing asymmetries of wealth and ecological impact between the global North and South (Triscott, 2017, p. 378). Dipesh Chakrabarty contends that thinking in climate change necessitates a negative universality, all differences notwithstanding, because climate precarity co-situates us all insofar as “there are no lifeboats here for the rich and privileged” (2009, p. 221). Yet, as Andreas Malm notes, “Species-thinking on climate change only induces paralysis. If everyone is to blame, then no one is” (2015). Such is the typical conclusion derived from the Anthropocene’s universalizing logic, a regressive figuration that lends itself all-too-readily to the “game over, it’s too late” rhetoric, in Haraway’s terms. If not the apocalypse verdict, Anthropocentric thinking fosters capitalist-technocratic solutions. By collapsing recent Earth history to its industrial and technological dimensions, the Anthropocene disavows the political ideologies which drive them and, in turn, rationalises further technological interventions in the earth’s systems via geoengineering, as if the causes of ecological crisis can be its solutions (Demos, 2017, p. 21). 

Challenging the viability of this conceptualization, Bruno Latour’s politics of nature advocates for the dissolution of the nature/culture dichotomy, calling for a horizontal redistribution of agency amongst other living beings as well as non-living entities. For Latour, the fault of Anthropocentric thought lies in its denial of nonhuman agency, and as such, he images a profoundly relational world which recognises our reliance on “the agency of other actants to accomplish both the feats and the horrors of human history” (Conty, 2016, p. 28). Tracing this fault back to modernism, Elmar Altvater contends the nature/culture divide possesses no basis in reality, but only in the European rationality of world domination (2016, p.149). For such moderns, the domain of nature consisted of natural environments, nonhuman species, and many human beings relegated to a subhuman status by virtue of race, gender and class. On the other hand, all non-modern societies were nature-cultures, conceptualizing ‘culture’ as a hybridized field constituted by a wider host of agents. As these hybrids proliferated, Latour would claim that the nature/culture dichotomy is a case of modern European bad faith, and that, citing from his book of the same title, “we have never been modern” (Conty, 2016). This theoretical turn away from dualisms has seen the emergence of new materialisms— a reconceptualization of the material world as possessing agency, entangling humans in a network that precedes and exceeds our representation of it. If the division of nature and culture and its subsequent “purification” of both domains relied on “the repression of the middle ground, the mediation that connects subjects with objects” (Koskentola, 2017, p. 41), a theoretical shift away from it inevitably necessitates its resurfacing. As per Latour, new materialism then locates its radicality in its capacity to turn the anthropological gaze back upon Europe, a mirror affirming that the European representation of the Other is a projection. Jessica Horton and Janet Berlo aptly parallel this mechanism to what Edward Said’s Orientalism exposes: “that when Europeans attempt to represent the Other, what they produce most accurately is an image of the self” (2013, p. 19). 

New materialism’s attentiveness to the ‘vitality’ of non-living entities has rendered it an apposite theoretical point of departure for curatorial practices engaged in ecological thinking. The shift away from Anthropocentric thought in artistic practices has manifested itself largely through a critique of subject-centred visuality: “Are there alternative ways of embodiment in nature that are not based on the visual gaze?”, asks Sabine Wilke, and calls for multisensory, materialized responses to the natural world that resist the paradigm of subjectivity (2013, p. 69). Testifying to the reciprocal entanglements between ecological thinking and contemporary art, Anselm Franke’s touring exhibition Animism employs new materialisms as both its subject matter and curatorial model. Animism situates itself reflexively, acknowledging the paradoxical position of the museum and the medium of the exhibition as it pertains to agent ontologies. In Animism: Notes on an Exhibition, Franke encapsulates this dilemma, asking, “what is a museum if not a grand de-animating machine?” (2012). If animism is a set of practices that resists objectification, Franke claims that an exhibition about animism is impossible within a European exhibitionary complex. Historically, museums have served as apparatuses for propagating mythologies of European colonial power, and central to these mythologies is the deanimating nature/culture divide; thus, if anything that enters a museum becomes an object of conservation, producing a unidirectional subject-object relationship, it could be argued that the ontological basis of museums reifies such dualisms. As Vincent Normand argues, the spatial logics of the museum reinforce the “ontological template” born at the nexus of scientific, political, and aesthetic projects of modernity (Davis and Turpin, 2015, p.14). With this in mind, what might a curatorial model that steps outside this matrix of modern dichotomies look like? Franke registers the futility of attempting to abandon this matrix; instead, he opts to act on and transform that which presents itself as a given “reality”— a decolonization of the modern colonial imaginary (Franke, 2012). Such a formulation owes much to postcolonial theory, revisiting animism as a constellation of European desires that enacts the very fetishisms it ascribes to the Other (Horton and Berlo, 2013). Like Latour, Franke seeks to turn the anthropological gaze ascribed onto colonized subjects back onto the moderns. Acknowledging the primitivist imprint left on ‘animism’, a term associated with “images of fetishes, totems,... savagery” (Franke, 2010, p. 11), Animism mobilises the term and its baggage as “an optical device”, a mirror that unveils the transgressive impurities that modernity’s dualisms had repressed. 

This schema is nowhere more apparent than in Franke’s interpretation of Jimmie Durham’s installation in Animism, The Dangers of Petrification I. The work consists of a series of vitrines housing pseudo-scientific displays of stone specimens, accompanied by handwritten labels identifying these stones as petrifications of a strip of bacon, a piece of bread, some Portuguese sausage. Franke champions the artist’s canny use of stone as a force of subversion; by taking into account how the European tradition uses stone to symbolise its desire for eternity, and in the form of carvings, to document its understandings of mimetic representation, The Dangers of Petrification locates its radicality in the inversion of such representation (Franke, 2012). Affirming the agency of material, the work is a mimicry of this mimesis enacted through natural, rather than cultural, processes. It is against this notion of an immortalizing mimetic representation that Durham short-circuits different temporalities— the unstable condition of a strip of bacon and the extensive process of turning-to-stone— and positions the states of ‘life’ and ‘nonlife’, of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ as relative extremes, offering a deconstruction of the subject-object dichotomy. 

The Dangers of Petrification I, 2007

Such a reading, consistent amongst Franke’s writings on the work of Jimmie Durham, places his previous claim- the impossibility of representing animistic modalities within a European exhibitionary framework- under scrutiny. What is suggested here is that representation is possible on the condition that it “pulls aside the rationalist veil” that shapes Europe’s perception of the Other (Franke in Horton and Berlo, 2013, p. 19). This formulation begs the question of what opportunities are available to Indigenous practitioners who wish to draw on cultural traditions while engaging modern art institutions (Horton and Berlo, 2013, p. 19). Franke’s insistence of the impossibility of representing animistic modalities within an exhibitionary complex, one that inevitably subjects them to a fantastical projection, appears to concretize the very binary he set out to dismantle: Indigenous animistic practices are circumscribed to the ‘environment’, a domain distinct from Europe, and therefore outside the realm of representation. And what he then offers as the exception- the harnessing of “strong negativity” to incite what modernity had repressed- seems no more virtuous or radical than a denial of it altogether. 

It is precisely this conditionality in Franke’s conception of Animism that betrays the limitations hindering the larger project of new materialisms. Is such a condition not the reification of the very dualisms Franke seeks to deconstruct in demanding that a practice originating in Indigenous knowledge occupies subject positions made available solely by the colonizer? Notwithstanding that the dismantling of colonialism’s discursive foundations is vital to any posthumanist political ecology, new materialisms must take into account the paradox of relegating Indigenous practices to a deconstruction of Europe’s foundational binaries (Horton and Berlo, 2013). Advocating for a schema “beyond the mirror”, Jessica Horton and Janet Berlo contest that global equity, the political promise of new materialisms, necessitates a transcultural engagement that enables Indigenous practices on their own terms. Such a criticism rouses another dilemma facing new materialisms: the modifiers of ‘new’ in new materialism and ‘post’ in posthumanism suggest a European developmental timeline that disregards the longstanding Indigenous tradition of agent ontologies. In the absence of an inclusive politics of citation, Jerry Lee Rosiek contends that new materialisms runs the risk of reinstating long-standing practices of Indigenous erasure, and consequently, enacting a performative inclusivity with the ethics of social inquiry claimed as its promise. This underscores the need for Eurocentric new materialists to recognise the pervasive context of settler colonialism in which they are working and, at minimum, pursue a reciprocal exchange to which all parties consent, an exchange which must be concomitantly underpinned by a robust solidarity in the work of promoting the well-being of Indigenous peoples (Rosiek, et al., 2020, p. 343). Such an approach would collectivize the terrain of decolonial struggle, foregrounding relationality and mutual sacrifice as the vehicle by which colonial systems can be sabotaged in favour of liberatory alternatives. Prioritizing relationality, Horton and Berlo propose a conceptualization of material “as a bridge, instead of a mirror”; in this formulation, the materials conceptualized and enacted in the work of Indigenous artists are no mere actants, but rather “enlivened with spirit” (Todd, 2015, p. 248). Contrary to Franke’s reading, Horton and Berlo interpret Durham’s work as mobilising materiality in the name of joining viewers into a shared fate with “material friends and foes”, a reminder that allies are vital to flourishing in a relational world wherein we all hold precarious positions (2013, p. 20). 

Encore Tranquillité, 2008

In his 2008 piece Encore Tranquillité, Durham once again employs stone as a material ally, drawing on the Indigenous tradition of personified stone: “...I do not like the way states turn stone into metaphor. So I decided to use another metaphor, and have stone represent Nature en toto” (Durham in Stauble, 2014). In Encore Tranquillité, the artist staged an encounter between a boulder and an ex-Soviet aeroplane in a Russian airfield outside Berlin, its cockpit demolished by the rock that had seemingly fallen out of the sky. In his ArtForum interview, Durham explains that the antiquated aeroplane had been considered unsafe by European standards and put up for sale in Africa, its fate predetermined by the ethical failures of the neocolonial marketplace (Durham in Ellegood, 2009). The longstanding status of stone as sculpture in art history is inverted here by Durham’s use of stone to sculpt other materials. Evincing stone’s agency, Encore Tranquillité may be read as a disruptive force against European metaphors relegating it to inertia. In Franke’s reading, Durham’s use of stone- a material ranking low in European value hierarchies- locates its subversive power in its possession of “strong negativity”, a “savagery” that disrupts those categories and, in turn, the rationalist veil that frames them. Horton and Berlo employ an alternative schema in their analysis, one that transcends the mirror; by splintering the aeroplane, the lively rock acted as “an unexpected ally in a tale of global injustice, a potential saviour of countless undervalued human lives” (2013, p. 22). Once relocated to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris for Durham’s 2009 retrospective, Rejected Stones, the work posed countless uncertainties to audiences- the stone’s origins, geographical or otherwise, the state of the aeroplane prior to demolition- in motion, stationary, or defunct- all ungraspable. As such, the rock signals the incalculability of material surrounding us in that it not only evinces animation and ethical orientation, but also “the ability to know things”, a concept communicated wordlessly (Horton and Berlo, 2013, p. 22). Without discounting the work of deconstructing colonialism’s discursive foundations, a political ecology that transcends the mirror, as proposed here, gestures us toward a revised vision of collaborative power as shared between human and nonhuman agents in a mutually affecting relationship.

At the nexus of the political ecologies discussed in this essay lies the common premise of precarity; but as evidenced, notwithstanding its unifying powers, the positions forged in response to this precarity must look beyond universalizing discourses. The failings of the Anthropocene thesis are not only reserved to its catastrophizing denial of recuperation, but extend to its disregard for the livelihoods of those situated outside the humanist conception of Man, human and nonhuman beings included. And while new materialisms is attributed to the growing recognition of the inviability of dualist paradigms, without a reciprocal engagement with Indigenous knowledges, it runs the comparable risk of concentrating the voice of Indigenous concerns in white hands. The dualisms it renounces have only ever been endemic to Eurocentric thought, and as such, any ‘post’-humanist political ecology which eschews the problematic temporal schema instantiated by its very terminology may well be at the service of re-entrenching neocolonialisms. With this in mind, this essay contends that new materialisms must make way for the agency of generative Indigenous practices in order to lay the groundwork for a compelling alternative to the Anthropocene. Within this larger critical project, calls for engagement with Indigenous ontologies have not been efforts to displace or supplant new materialisms, but rather calls for new materialisms to not be an agent of displacement (Rosiek, et al., 2020). As such, new materialists must work towards a more robust solidarity that stretches to nonhuman agents as well as the humans who are too often left out of the equation. It is through such a terrain of respectful, consensual convergences between equal agents- Europeans and Indigenous peoples, humans and other-than-humans- that we may begin to identify the principles of an equitable geopolitics that loosens the grip of the Anthropocene’s mythologies.

Works cited 

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opulence, you own everything!: appropriation, excess and fantasy as critique in queer performance

Lustrous pearls adorning the décolletage, fur stole flung effortlessly over the shoulder, puppy in hand- itself bejeweled- a model struts her stuff down a runway. Against all odds, this scene finds its origins far from a Paris Fashion Week catwalk. Rather, we find the fashion capital in flames in Jennie Livingston’s 1991 documentary, Paris is Burning, as this lavishly dressed figure is revealed to be a drag queen executing her closest mimicry of that haute couture model in a Harlem ballroom. Fortifying this fleeting fantasy is the voice of emcee Junior LaBeija, who triumphantly proclaims: “Opulence, you own everything!” And for a transient moment, albeit illusory, she does own everything. In abjuring the distinction between existence and essence, realness is achieved- an indistinguishability from the real haute couture model, the affluent, the white ideal, the hegemonic. Realness thus constitutes the site of a phantasmatic transformation- sartorial, gestural and performative, a symbolic crossing over by an individual outside the racial and sexual mainstream to a realm of power. Through the tragicomic imitation of a morphological ideal, this drag queen- black, queer, and likely impoverished- comes to actualise the aesthetic of owning everything, so convincing one could almost forget the great chasm between that which is being imitated and that which is actually real- real being racism, homophobia, and poverty. 

Elucidated by queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, the concept of disidentification, as it pertains to imitation, echoes through much of the strategies of resistance employed by the African-American and Latinx performers in Paris is Burning. These strategies- namely the hyperbolic parodying of dominant norms- neither opt to align with the cultural logics of dominant ideologies, nor do they strictly oppose them; rather, they seek to negotiate with the phobic majoritarian sphere by “transforming these works for their own cultural purposes” (Muñoz, 1999). Naturally, this alignment calls into question whether the denaturalization of a dominant norm, by its exaggerated rearticulation, succeeds in displacing that norm, or serves to perpetually reidealize it, to inculcate the very phobic ideals one seeks to annihilate. Though epitomised through aesthetics, these ideals bear implications beyond the superficial, lest we forget what is at stake here- the end of Paris is Burning sees the brutal murder of Venus Xtravaganza, a Latina transgender woman of the ballroom community- a painful reaffirmation that the destabilization of gender does not necessarily entail a liberation from hegemonic constraint. This tension is one that persists now, as drag surges in popularity while transphobic and homophobic hate crimes simultaneously surge in numbers. The radical potential of drag, it seems, is located in its willingness to abjure the distinction between truth and fantasy- to embrace artifice seriously by staging fictions of gender, class, sexuality, and the body to which we remain firmly attached. Yet, as Slavoj Žižek contends, if the very nature of ideological interpellation is such that we persist in it, insisting on the futility of ‘cynical distance’ as he calls it (Greer, 2014, p. 78), how are we to account for the longstanding attribution of drag’s critical power to a mimicry that accentuates this distance? Judith Butler, on the other hand, is more optimistic; countering Žižek’s equation of disidentification to political immobilization, she puts forward the possibility of politicizing disidentification, citing it as a “point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference” (1993, p. 219). With a recognition of that which is at stake- fundamental human rights, to be precise- this essay aims to engage with the discomfort surrounding the aforementioned question of disidentification’s precarious implications. This tension can be productive; resisting its characterisation as a deadlock, I aim to highlight the hybrid conceptual terrain wherein performative critique possesses the possibility to enact systemic change within and against the hegemonic order, and additionally forge kinships that preserve queer existence- a defiant act in itself. Premised on Judith Butler’s gender performativity and Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation, I will mobilise Muñoz’s rhetorical practice of disidentification to analyse the mode by which drag performers, particularly those in Paris is Burning, situate themselves within and against dominant discourses through which they are called upon to identify, and ultimately fail to. With a focus on the transformative dimension of queer theatricality, this analysis will further centre on the function of opulence, as the aesthetic of abundance, to assess its efficacy as liberationist political critique. For the purposes of this essay, it is critical to note that despite a premise on performative views of gender, a necessary distinction- though mutually inclusive- between the identities and (dis)identifications of transgender individuals and drag performers is recognised.

Paris is Burning (1991) is a landmark documentary that chronicles the ballroom subculture of African-American and Latinx queers in New York City during the 1980s. Seven years in the making, the film offers an intimate portrait of drag balls in their golden age, following the members of rival fashion ‘houses’ as they navigate their identities, ball competitions, and the adversities of a world rampant with homophobia, transphobia, and classism.  In the competitions, contestants walk under a specific category as they execute their closest emulation- sartorial, gestural and performative- of a member of the stated category, many of which are drawn from hegemonic white culture as signifiers of class, e.g. ‘executive realness’ and the Ivy League student (Butler, 1999, p. 341). That is not to say, however, that whiteness is the sole site of articulation for this ideologically-implicated transformation; in fact, many of the categories, such as ‘banjee’, reflect a straightness not originating in white culture, but rather a racialized and hence frequently masculinised heterosexuality. The primary standard amongst which contestants are judged for these performances is ‘realness’- and central to ‘realness’ is the ability to compel belief, to approximate legitimacy by producing the naturalised effect (Butler, 1999, p. 341). With the ideology that one can ‘dress for success’, the performances in Paris Is Burning certainly may produce a resistance at the level of subjectivity, with many of the participants hoping to deploy their appearance as the vehicle into becoming “a rich somebody”. What is not so apparent, however, is whether ballroom drag considers how such tokenization or meritocracy may well be at the service of entrenching the same relations of exploitation it seeks to dismantle (Champagne, 1995, p. 113). And more critically, Paris is Burning as a whole rouses the central dilemma of queer performance: is the affective power of spectacle sufficient to invigorate a resistance at a structural level? And in turn, can the critical power yielded by drag, by its representational strategies of parody, masquerade and creolization, serve as an end in and of itself?

In his seminal book Disidentifications: Queers of Colour and the Performance of Politics, José Esteban Muñoz depicts the survival strategies of minoritarian subjects cultivated in response to the cultural logics that undergird state power- namely, heteronormativity, misogyny and white supremacy. In the face of such hegemonic forces, Muñoz explains, those who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship must interface with alternative subcultural fields and identificatory sites in order to forge a sense of self (1999, p. 5). In so doing, the subject may opt for the assimilationist, ‘model minority’ exemplar, or alternatively, counter-identify entirely by rejecting majoritarian cultural signifiers (Klitgård, 2019, p. 120). Central to Muñoz’s text is the introduction of a third account of minoritarian cultural politics in its confrontation with the white heterosexual paradigm- disidentification, whereby one embraces the failed interpellation in an incorporation of the contradictions that the misrecognition produces- a recovery of elided or disavowed identifications. Predicated on political theorist William E. Connolly’s account of self-formation, Muñoz positions his formulation within the now stale essentialism versus anti-essentialism debate, as it pertains to identity, by citing a hybridized take as a reprieve from this seeming deadlock. Connolly’s formulation treats identity as a site of struggle where entrenched, ‘essential’ dispositions encounter socially constituted narratives of the self, a productive clash which understands power and discourse to be unstable formations. However, for Louis Althusser, ideology is an inescapable realm, embedded in state apparatuses, by which a preconstituted subject is “hailed” into being. In keeping with the Althusserian concept of interpellation, this call-and-response system- a subject-forming hail- implies that “there is no ideology except by the subject and for the subject” (Althusser, 2001, p. 115). Yet, for many, it seems that Althusser’s emphasis on the institutionally entrenched nature of ideology, interpellated as a unilateral operation, leaves little room for the potential of a rejection of the subject-forming hail. What are the possibilities for an identity where a subject disobeys an interpellating law? In Ideology, Discourse, and Cultural Studies: The Contribution of Michel Pêcheux, Montgomery and Allan bring light to Michel Pêcheux’s schema of disidentification, one that offers possibilities for the realization of a counter-hegemonic politic at the level of a call-and-response encounter. In the context of drag, this schema takes on the form of a parodic conformity that calls into question the legitimacy of the command, a hyperbolic reiteration of the interpellative law against the very authority that delivers it, a working ‘on and against’ hegemonic order. The moment when fixed predispositions and socially encoded scripts of identity collide serves precisely as the point at which “hybrid, racially predicated, and deviantly gendered identities arrive at representation” (Muñoz, 1999, p. 6). In so doing, according to Muñoz, the symbolic order “receives a jolt that may reverberate loudly and widely, or in less dramatic, yet locally indispensable ways” (1999, p. 6). But in exactly what form does this ‘jolt’ materialize? Judith Butler contests that drag, with mimicry being its nexus, is a “site of a certain ambivalence, one which reflects the more general situation of being implicated in the very regimes of power one opposes” (1999, p. 338). 

In Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, Butler discusses the reception of her seminal work, Gender Trouble, critically; she states that while many readers understood the text as advocating for the proliferation of drag as a means of subverting dominant norms, Butler herself insists that “there is no necessary relation between drag and subversion” (1999, p. 338). Rather, she positions herself with a teetering ambivalence toward the implications of mimicry, maintaining that drag may well be used as a vehicle for both the denaturalization and reconsolidation of hegemonic norms. Within the framework of gender performativity, it could be argued that all gender is like drag, or is drag. What this implies is that mimicry is too at the heart of the cis-heterosexual project, that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a continual effort to resignify its own idealizations for which no original exists, to undertake pathologizing practices in order to consecrate its own claim on propriety, ever haunted by the ‘alternative’ sexual possibilities that may threaten its categorical stability (Butler, 1999, p. 338). If one is to follow this line of reasoning, drag is then critical to the extent that it destabilises hegemonic gender by demonstrating the imitative nature by which the cis-heterosexual identity is itself produced- that is, if gender is a rearticulation of norms which “precede, constrain and exceed the performer” (Butler, 1993, p. 24), then disidentification is made manifest in drag in that it envisions the possibilities of a subjectivity beyond the dominant identifications by occupying and (re)appropriating those same identifications (Greer, 2014, p. 85). In so doing, drag harnesses the potential to establish ‘counterpublics’ as Muñoz calls them, wherein “communities and relational chains of resistance…contest the dominant public sphere” (1999, p. 146) , inasmuch as its disidentificatory performances, by tactically misrecognising the interpellative hail, expose the pathologizing and exclusionary machinations of hegemonic ideology and ultimately rework its structures to include and empower marginalized identities (Greer, 2014, p. 86). 

In his analysis of the process of ‘tactical misrecognition’, however, Stephen Greer characterises performance ‘amateurism’ as vital for an effective critique, implicitly problematizing the notion of realness in drag balls. Where the approximation of realness wields a critical irony upon the equation of gender to drag (the dominant norm emulated precisely to achieve realness being fictitious itself), Žižek’s claim that “an ideological edifice might be undermined by a too literal identification” (2008, p. 703) countermands it. Described as “a form of labour that misses a mark or under-achieves intentionally” (Bailes qtd in Greer, 2014, p. 87), performance ‘amateurism’ deploys self-aware ‘errors’ of presentation to capitalise on the chasm between what could be achieved through a virtuosic performance and what is being achieved. In wavering between two horizons of value, ‘amateurism’ presents a means of detecting the exclusionary and unattainable workings of power on which hegemonic representation relies. What this implies for Paris is Burning is that the sincerity displayed by the ball contestants to approximate the legitimacy of the ideal may inadvertently undermine the critical power of their performances. And although understood to be mimicry in the context of the balls, many of the performers, in between intertitles, describe their desire to “live a normal happy life”- a desire that anchors the interpellative powers of the heterosexual ideal. When Venus Xtravaganza, who is later murdered in a transphobic hate crime, explains how she “would like to be a spoiled rich white girl”, to “get married in church, in white”, to be “a complete woman”, it necessarily evokes the question of whether her efforts at denaturalising gender and sexuality culminates in a restructuring of the cis-heterosexual norm. Drawing upon Gramsci, Butler contends that the accumulated force of these entrenched hegemonies-  gendered, racial and economic- overwhelms “the more fragile effort to build an alternative cultural configuration from or against that more powerful regime” (1999, p. 344). This is exemplified by the account of Venus’s death at the end of the film, as we are painfully reminded of the potentially fatal implications of denaturalisation- that is, while she transgresses the frameworks of hegemonic gender and sexuality, Butler explains, “the hegemony that reinscribes the privileges of normative femininity and whiteness wields the power to renaturalize [her] body”, as her murderer presumes her cisgenderedness in a concealment of the prior transgression, “an erasure that is her death” (1999, pp. 344-345).

Similarly, by approaching the disidentificatory performances in Paris is Burning as both an instance and representation of nonproductive expenditure, drag may be read as a parodic fulfilment of an interpellative hail that inadvertently produces the opposite effect; rather than destabilising consumerist culture, it merely reifies it. In accordance with Butler’s foregrounding of gender as the site of articulation, it is necessary that the economic is neither privileged as the sole mode of transformation, nor is its role in the functioning of hegemonic order overlooked. On one hand, the excessively stylized body, with its large dose of affect, critically displaces the modestly gendered body of the disciplined subject, allowing for an indulgence otherwise deprived of the performer. In a concealment of their real economic conditions- and for much of the performers, this being poverty- the synthesis of material excess with skilful artifice transmogrifies the impoverished body into a simulacrum of wealth; when emcee Junior LaBeija proclaims “Opulence!”, it is not so much a reflection of an actual state of abundance so much as an aesthetic of abundance. Opulence thus serves as the vehicle by which the disidentifying subject forges the fantasy of abundance, not merely for the sake of gratuitous glitz and hedonism, but rather to underscore the unjust conditions borne at the intersection of race with class, of blackness with economic disadvantage. With a shift to reception, however, Champagne cites the “wanton expenditure and glamour” of the disidentifying body as overwhelming its spectator with “an ‘excess’ of pleasurable affect” (2014, p. 123), the same affective response bell hooks condemns as voyeurism in her provocative review of the film. What this means for Paris is Burning, as per Champagne, is that it runs the risk of valorizing the ‘nobility’ of conspicuous consumption (2014, p. 123)- a necessary critique that accentuates the interwoven machinations of racism, homophobia and classism under capitalism, but which also fails to offer alternatives for a disidentificatory practice grounded in the appropriation of the very norms instilled by the ideological state apparatuses of capitalism. That said, it would be reductive to examine the critical power of drag exclusively through the individual transformations undertaken by disidentifying subjects. What remains at the core of the ballroom scene documented by Livingston is the forging of a collective minoritarian counterpublic; between the narrative intercuts, we bear witness to the myriad (dis)identifications of the ballroom community: those who undergo these elaborate metamorphoses only within the parameters of the ball; those who cross-dress in public as well as in the balls but resist the label of transgender; those who identify as transgender and additionally participate in drag. Amongst these varied iterations of disidentification is the common denominator of marginalization, which, despite all its adversities, possesses a silver lining of kinship that reconfigures the exclusionary structures and temporalities of a hegemonic cis-heterosexual way of life- a resignification of family. Not only do these systems of kinship, constituted by ‘mothers’, ‘children’ and ‘houses’, sustain the balls themselves, but provide sustenance, solidarity and hope for a historically oppressed community in the face of racism, poverty and homophobia. It is crucial to note that the resignification of a nuclear family is not an insignificant imitation- in fact, it is the elaboration of kinship forged through an appropriation of the very structures that oppress it “that such a resignification creates the discursive and social space for a community” (Butler, 1999, p. 348).

As drag enters the mainstream, the discursive limits of queer performance must undoubtledly expand upon the prospects of commercialization, deradicalization and gentrification. Taking into account the myriad dilemmas invoked by this mainstreaming, in conjunction with the longstanding questions pertaining to its efficacy as a counter-hegemonic critique, drag continues to be a site of ambivalence that, in its varied iterations, reflects the strained condition of a minoritarian community as it collides with the majoritarian. What comes of it, at the very least, is an undoubtedly exhilarating glimpse into the possibilities of self-presentation outside the exclusionary works of the white cis-heterosexual paradigm, presentations that hold the self-proclaimed licence to destabilize our preconceptions that uphold structures of institutionalized racism, homophobia and misogyny. Paris is Burning represents a mere fragment of an infinitely broader history, and history to be made, but it certainly betrays the larger condition of drag as neither an unequivocal insurrection nor a painful re-subordination. If, as per Althusser, ideology is an inescapable realm, then drag demonstrates that, in spite of this fact, discourse neither necessarily determines a subject and nor does it foreclose the possibility of individual agency. But whether drag as a disidentificatory practice, in its totality, can wield a resistance at a structural level remains unclear. At its core, drag projects fantasies in the hope of their fruition, and even where this falls short, is it not a resistance to self-preserve, to mobilise one’s agency when its erasure and suppression are awfully convenient for the hegemonic machinations of the world? And perhaps it is the very fact of drag’s ambiguity that sustains its status as a site of subversion, a domain that circumvents demarcation and definition, and hence serves a vehicle for unhindered queer expression in all its variations. 

Works cited

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