Women, particularly white upper-class women, are
perceived to have power. Livingston suggests through the voices of the
sages, Pepper LaBaja and Dorian Corey, that transsexuality or "opting out"
of queerness is not any easier. Pepper LaBaja notes: I have never been
a woman. I can only say how a man who acts like a woman feels. A lot of
kids that I know got the sex change because they felt like oh, I've been
treated so bad as a drag queen, if I get a pussy, I'll be treated
fabulous. But women get treated bad...so having a vagina doesn't mean you
might have a
, it might in fact be worse.
Both Brooke and
Venus identify with women to such an extent that they forego their
connection to their non-biological gay family and assimilate into
straight culture. Venus senses the price she will have to make to pay to
fully "identify" as a woman: If you're married and a woman, in the
suburbs...and she wants him to buy her a washer and dryer set, in order
for him to buy that, I'm sure she'd have to go to bed with him anyway to
give him what he wants in order for her to get what she wants. In the
long run it all ends up the same way.
Venus's fatalistic comment gets to
the crux of the "matter": either as a transsexual or as a straight woman,
she is written out of the dominant narrative because "it all ends up the
same way." Venus seems to understand that while white women have power in
certain contexts, and while gay men have power within the context of the
"ball room," their power is proscribed by patriarchal heteronormative
ideologies. Venus's body and gender performance resignify the
stereotypical "feminine" gender, but her desire for woman's power, such
that she is willing to disavow her gayness to pass as a straight woman,
produces negative results. Misogynist violence is doubly resonant: Venus
is killed both because of her present male body which passes as female and
because that vulnerability did not, in the end, offer itself to be
penetrated . Friedberg suggests that identification, particularly through
cinematic spectatorship, allows the subject two choices: to view and
devour or to view and become (44). In "Paris Is Burning," realness is a
stand-in for the ego ideal or what one would like to devour and become.
Dorian Corey explains that "In a ball room, you can be anything you want.
You're not really an executive, but you look like an executive, and
therefore you're showing the straight world that 'I can be an executive.'"
Drag become s a vehicle for reworking and camping "cannibalism."