Here the postmodern
phenomenon of "trying on" the Other loops back to the body as a site of
construction and as site of corporeal determination. The body, in the
final instance of "Paris Is Burning," literally determines life. The
interdependence of dominance and resistance gathers around the nexus of
female impersonation and determines the "containment" endings of both
"Paris Is Burning" and a film like "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert." It is
crucial to note what can happen when the resignifying
body "takes on" the Other: the woman is killed off in one narrative, and
demonized in the other. The performative aspects of female impersonation
differ according to context: "taking on" an identity assumes
life-threatening consequences for gay men in "Paris Is Burning," and
jouissance for gay men in "Priscilla." Female impersonation is a
complicated nexus of longing and disavowal, subordination and agency.
The recent and noteworthy proliferation of "drag" films suggests the
desire to "try on" performative and usually "queer" practices of
cross-dressing and femininity, the desire to laugh and empathize with
queer performativity, and the desire to fetishize and release homoerotic
impulses. Marjorie Garber locates the discomforting element of drag in
ambivalence: "The most extraordinary cultural work done by the
transvestite in the context of American 'race relations' is to foreground
the impossibility of taxonomy, the fatal imitation of classification as
segregation, the inevitability of 'miscegenation' as misnomer" (274). Drag,
then, foregrounds ambivalence in terms of taxonomy, suggesting that what
you "take on" may sometimes "take you." The constitutive nature of drag
never easily illustrates power relations. Homi Bhabha discusses the
ambivalence of both racial and gender stereotyping: "Likewise the
stereotype, which is [fixity's] major discursive strategy, is a form of
know ledge and identification that vacillates between what is always 'in
place,' already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated"
(18). Power relations are contingent upon ambivalence: drag is thus an
intricate site of resistance, power, and pleasure, or a site at which
power is reconfigured, not just hegemonically reproduced. The more recent
valorization of performativity as jouissance coupled with the growing
popularity of drag which is rarely "taken to task" for its sexism renders
"ambivalence" politically suspect. I see gay male identification with
women, both positive and negative, which intersects with performative drag
gestures, as a quintessential Sedgwickian configuration: each seeks to
consolidate the male-male homoerotic bond, whether through hetero or
homosexual coupling, by invisibilizing the female. What is "left out"
emerges in curious places, either through the containment of the woman
in a film like
"Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," or through the daily appropriation of the
"feminine"
as a vehicle for a perceived biological woman's heteronormative power in
"Paris is Burning." These two varieties of drag produce two different
effects: through "specular cannibalism," one desires or devours the
woman, and through "scopic bulimia," the other disavows her. Both are
fundamentally the same: both absent the always already present biological
woman.