1. Year 3 Re-enactment module Autumn 2016
Paris is Burning
Year 3 Re-enactment module
Autumn 2016

2. Two themes:
Butler’s conceptualisation of ‘performativity’ relating to drag, cross-dressing and the imitation of gender.
The idea of performing the self for the non-fictional camera.

3. Judith Butler
The writings of Judith Butler and especially her notion of PERFORMATIVITY come from a long lineage of feminist scholarship that has considered issues of gender, sex, identity:

4. Simone de Beauvoir
One is not born a woman; rather one becomes one. The Second Sex, 1949

5. Joan Rivière
The reader may well now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the “masquerade”. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing. ‘Womanliness as masquerade’, 1929.

6. Judith Butler
Opening line, Gender Trouble: ‘For the most part, feminist theory has assumed that there is some existing identity, understood through the category of women, who not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse, but constitutes the subject for whom political representation is pursued’

7. Butler and theories of identity
But as Butler recognises, the idea of a stable subject and/or IDENTITY has been questioned by post-structuralist theory
E.g. LACAN: the idea that we learn who we are, how to behave or speak, how to be in public through imitating others  there’s no innate, natural, preconstituted I
For Butler, IDENTITY = A MISNOMER (4, Gender T): asking why we attach so much importance to the FEMININE  thereby decontextualizing it from other forces that also constitute identity such as: RACE, ETHNICITY, CLASS.
Asking then: “To what extent does the category of women achieve stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix?”  questioning here the BINARY THOUGHT patterns of the French feminist theorists – Irigaray, Cixous – from the 70s/80s – who saw as WOMAN =NOT MAN etc.

8. Marjorie Garber Vested Interests (1992)
Garber: third term . Defining transvestism as an unstable, mutable identity that sits outside – and reflects back upon – more stable genders and doesn’t belong within the simple BINARY THUOGHT model

9. Cross-dressing
Marjorie Garber Vested Interests (1992): idea of the “third term” who is neither male or female. Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot

10. Some Like it Hot

11. Other cinematic ‘third terms’: Lover Come Back; Bringing Up Baby

12. Not the third term: Tootsie, Sydney Pollack 1982

13. Not the ‘third term’: Mrs Doubtfire, Chris Columbus 1993

14. Butler on drag in Gender Trouble
‘The notion of an original or primary gender identity is often parodied with the cultural practices of drag, cross-dressing and the sexual stylization of butch/femme identities. Within feminist theory, such parodic identities have been understood to be either degrading to women, in the case of drag and cross-dressing, or an uncritical appropriation of sex-role stereotyping from within the practice of heterosexuality’

15. Butler: the original and the imitation
She continues: ‘But the relation between the “imitation” and the “original” is, I think, more complicated than that critique generally allows … The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality … the performance (of gender) suggests a dissonance not only between sex and perofrmace, but sex and gender, and gender and performance’

16. Butler: the original and the imitation
Concluding: ‘In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency … The notion of gender parody defended here does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original …’

17. Butler: gender as imitation
‘Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts’.

18. Gender and performance
Gender therefore becomes and always is a performance  a ‘stylized repetition of acts’  Learnt through mimicry of others.

19. Judith (Jack) Halberstam Female Masculinity, 1998
“What is masculinity? if masculinity is not the social and cultural and indeed political expression of maleness, then what is it?’ (1) “Because the definitional boundaries of male and female are so classic, there are very few people in any given public space who are completely readable in terms of gender” (20)

20. Paris is Burning

21. The performative documentary
What is the ‘truth’ of a documentary? That which is performed in front of, for the benefits of the camera This again is an imitation of an imitation The relationship between representation and reality is not entirely stable, known or containable

22. J.L. Austin
Starting point: JL AUSTIN (1970)  performative utterances – like Butler’s acts – that both describe and perform an action: “I do” in the wedding ceremony; “I name this ship the Queen as breaking the bottle against the side of a vessel.
In saying what you do in these situations, you perform the action. Saying without performing them is meaningless.

23. The documentary original and imitation?
The explicitly performative documentary makes these residual realisations that truth is unstable EXPLICIT – they reflexively signal the documentary’s artificiality, its constructedness: speaking in front of the camera, from behind the camera, interrupting, excessive stylisation a la Morris, etc.

24. The performative documentary
The explicitly performative documentary makes these residual realisations that truth is unstable EXPLICIT – they reflexively signal the documentary’s artificiality, its constructedness: speaking in front of the camera, from behind the camera, interrupting, excessive stylisation a la Morris, etc.
such docs choose to accentuate not mask the means of production; they realise all doc = a masquerade.
There is a notable performance componenent
Feels as if the doc making proces itself is being enacted

25. Act of God (Peter Greenaway,

26. Unmade Beds (Nicholas Barker, 1997)
In building his 4 portraits, Barker refuses to give us basic biographical information (“as soon as I give you that information, I provide an easy handle for your prejudices’). 2 sides to it: interviews with the 4; shots through NYC windows.

27. Unmade Beds style
Both highly stylized: interviews shot from ‘a formal script which was the negotiated with the principal characters who were then directed under more or less feature film conditions to perform pretty much as we’d agreed’ Barker interviewed 1999 Bruzzi New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, p. 161.

28. Unmade Beds style
Barker sought to give the ‘illusion of spontaneity’.

29. John Ellis Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation (2012)
‘any social situation involves a performance … ‘This division of activity or expression is no dishonest pretence; it lies at the heart of human interaction. Humans are social beings, so they have a “face” which is to be maintained’ (pp. 47—8)