Critical Analysis of Bell Hooks’ “Is Paris Burning?”
Rachel Tucker
Dr. Nicholas de Villiers
FIL3006
Fall 2018
Critical Analysis of Bell Hooks’ “Is Paris Burning?”
In chapter nine of Bell Hooks’ Black Looks, “Is Paris Burning?”, Hooks critiques the film Paris is Burning from a black feminist perspective. She argues that the drag culture portrayed in Paris is Burning is not subversive, but fixated upon whiteness. She says that the black and Latino drag queens in the film not only fail to critique “white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” (Hooks, 147) – they seek to emulate it. She also makes a distinction between “ritual” and “spectacle” in reference to how black gay culture is portrayed in the documentary.
Hooks explains that the film fails to “interrogate whiteness” (Hooks, 149) and portrays a sanitized version of poor black life where everyone yearns to be rich and white. She says, “What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise and make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure.” (Hooks, 149). For the transgender women of color in the film, emulating heterosexual female whiteness is a matter of safety and often survival. Trans women (especially trans women of color) are expected to perform hyper-femininity not only to be deemed “passable”, but to avoid street harassment and possible violence. These trans women see heterosexual female whiteness as an escape from transmisogynistic violence and ultimately poverty. Hooks should have made a distinction between these women and the male drag queens in her work (not to mention that her use of “him/her” when referring to Venus, who describes herself as a woman, is disrespectful). However, Hooks is correct in saying that Paris is Burning does not explicitly challenge white supremacy. This is evident in her anecdote about viewing the film with a white audience vs a black audience. Those who already have an understanding of class-consciousness and racism can see through the upbeat attitude of much of the film and recognize that this is a community born from pain. Many of the documentary’s subjects were exiled from their families and communities and thus had to create their own. This is evident in the language that the queens use to describe the structure of their community: “houses”, “mothers”, “families”. The white, heterosexual, upper-class audiences have no frame of reference to recognize oppression, so they do not identify with those aspects of the film, whereas a black, gay, poor audience does.
Hooks contradicts herself when she describes her own experiences with drag as “symbolically crossing from the world of powerlessness into a world of privilege” (Hooks, 145), and yet criticizes the drag queens for emulating (white, upper-class) privilege. She describes her drag as “ritual”, while often referring to the queens’ drag as “spectacle”. The distinction between “ritual” and “spectacle” is presented as a dichotomy that is based on perception. She also presents a similar dichotomy between “reality” and “fantasy”. In the text, ritual is performance of a culture for other members of that culture. Spectacle is performance of a culture to be consumed and commodified by the dominant culture, which in the case of the film, is white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Hooks argues that the white filmmaker treats black gay culture as a spectacle and relies heavily on the idea of fantasy as a means of escape. She says, “…the point is not to give us fantasy, but to recognize its limitations… one must distinguish the place of fantasy in ritualized play from the use of fantasy as a means of escape.” (Hooks, 156).
Works Cited