The Harlem Drag Culture :: History Culture Cultural Essays

The Harlem Drag CultureFoucault, Moraga, Fuss, hooks, Butler. These authors, along with many more, view as concerned themselves with the be of categories. In reading these authors our class has, upon every occasion of meeting, discussed the skeletonation of categories. What we have discovered, in part, is that things are not specify by what they are, but by what they are not. Diana Fuss, in her article Inside/Out, states any identity is founded relationally, make up in reference to an exterior or outback(a) that defines the subjects own intimate 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 deprivation of one. Defining identity is not necessarily so binary. As Cherre 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 bloodless patriarchy, are defined by how they differ from this white patriarchy. Our class was favour to be introduced to one subculture found in Harlem during the late 1980s by means of the docuwork forcetary capital of France 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 yet 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 puff out balls, balls in which the men dressed up and competed in different categories, much(prenominal) 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 Bur ning, reading critiques of it, listening to class discussions, and processing through my own thoughts well-nigh the film that I have come to struggle with an extremely boastful tension I am confronted with in thinking about the shack ball subculture of Harlem. Is the mimicking of dominant society by this culture a look of subverting it or is it supporting and perpetuating the white patriarchal ideal? Do these men redefine dominant society in their own terms and posit control of it?