04 marzo 2013

On Why It Drives Me Crazy When My Sister Uses the Word "Realness"


Yesterday, my sister posted a photo to instagram. She was in a thrift shop and tried on a long, coffee brown wool coat. “Worth $60?” she wrote in the caption. I personally sent her a text message and told her my only hesitation would be the puffy-ish sleeves. But a friend of hers (I assume, I couldn’t tell by the instagram name who it was) responded “80’s chic realness.”



“Realness” is a term used by contributors to the 1980s Ball circuit in New York (and possibly more widespread) as captured in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning. For those that have never seen the film, the ball circuit was something of an underground fashion and dance competition in which generally lower-income LGBT folks of color caroused. Trophies were awarded for a number of “categories” of what I will call “presentation” (after Goffman). In essence the folks who participated dressed up, sometimes in elaborate drag ballgowns, and sometimes in more “real” clothes. Realness here is used to describe the portrayal of a category that you are not, yet can be commonly found on the streets of New York. Examples from the film include Town & Country, High Fashion, Military, and Business Executive. Because these folks were generally excluded from participation in the 9-5 economy (what Halberstam might today call normative time and space, in contrast to queer time and space), worked in underground economies, had often been kicked out of their natal families, and faced the unchecked homophobia that was still rampant in the 1980s, they rarely had significant financial resources. Thus, to present themselves as a high fashion Parisian could be considered a form of subversive drag. These folks for many reasons would never hold a job as a business executive.

Yet, as Dorian Corey explains
In real life, you can’t get a job as an executive unless you have the educational background and the opportunity. Now the fact that you are not an executive is merely because of the social standing of life. That is just a pure thing. Black people have a hard time getting anywhere. And those that do are usually straight. In a ballroom you can be anything you want. You are not really an executive, but you’re looking like an executive. And therefore you are showing the straight world that I can be an executive. If I had the opportunity I can be one, because I can look like one. And that is like a fulfillment. Your peers, your friends are telling you “Oh, you’d make a wonderful executive.”


Paris is Burning is something of a cult classic, well known among the fabulous, LGBT friendly circles of middle class, college educated young folks of the United States. When my sister and her friends use it, they are accessing communal knowledge about a subculture of which they are very much not a part. The first time I heard them use the term in such a way, I voiced my protest. But well…it’s a lot of work to change language once its in use. And while words like “queer” can be effectively reclaimed (as evidenced both by my undergraduate seminar on Sex, Gender, and Culture, as well as Paul Baker’s work with corpus linguistics on the subject), and perhaps words like “gay” can be kept limited to signify a particular identification category and swayed away from meaning “stupid,” Realness is a different case. First, I’m not sure anyone else is concerned about it the way I am. And second, its not widespread: I’m fairly certain I’ve never heard anyone use it this way aside from my sister and her friends.

(Though, I did once walk into a swanky New York Mexican restaurant and sit down at a table of old friends, including the casting director for the Broadway production of Paris is Burning, and was greeted with “The legendary….Nell!”)

But despite its limited use, it bothers me. Its being reappropriated by a group of very different people and through that process becoming divorced from the very political economic base of its origin. In essence, it was used as a form of protest (Disidentification, in Muñoz’s words) by people who were subaltern in almost every possible way. Lacking access to resources, their play and performance critiqued the “straight” and “executive” world which in many ways subjectivizd them as subaltern. And though my sister and her friends aren’t necessarily “straight” and/or “executives,” they are part of a middle class subject position that does have access to upwardly mobile jobs. They are able to buy nice clothing, travel, and eat at restaurants. They participate in the official economy. They have parents who love and accept them. And as a product of changing social hegemony, those that are in same-sex relationships can be open about them to family, friends, and employers. They are not the descendents of Ball Culture. They are the people that make all the “Gay Ghettos White” (Nero 2005)

Now, I am no proponent of some monolithic idea of “authenticity.” I see authenticity as a social value which changes according to the other social values of the time. Something undoubtedly inflected by politics, socio-economics, globalization, and most certainly capitalism. But much Blackface and the contemporary manifestations of race, gender, sexuality, religion, and economic status-based forms of performance that exploit underrepresented and subaltern folks (Debord 1994, Deloria 1998, Desmond 1999, Favor 1999, Howells 2006, Jewell 1993, Rohrer 2009), the appropriation of once subversive forms of presentation by the mainstream depoliticizes them, obscuring the inequalities that exist(ed) as part of their original usage.

And in my opinion, obscuring inequalities is no laughing matter. Its that erasure that allows so much injustice in the world to go unnoticed.

But perhaps this is just another manifestation of the ways postmodern (Harvey 1998) processes hyper-real-ize our lives. The picture was of a thrift store coat originally manufactured 1980s, on instagram—artificially made to look as if it were a polaroid from the early 1980s, and the comment referenced a social manifestation of the mid-1980s. And yet, in our world, none of this is noteworthy. We recycle the past, divorcing it from its original context constantly. We live now live in a hyper-real simulacra (Baudrillard 1991) which erases so much history and context, we no longer know if there even is an original to which it refers.

In essence, there is no realness any more.

References

Baker, Paul
2013  Lavender Discourse and Change 1994-2012: A Diachronic Corpus Analysis of 18 years.  20th Annual Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference. Washington, DC.

Baudrillard, Jean
2001  Simulacra and Simulations. In Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford  University Press.


Debord, Guy
1994  The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.

Deloria, Philip J.
1998  Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Desmond, Jane C.
1999  Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Favor, J. Martin
1999  Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance. Durham: Duke University Press.

Goffman, Erving
1959  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Prentice Hall.

Harvey, David
1990 The Condition of Post Modernity. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 

Howells, Richard
2006 “Is it Because I is Black?” Race, Humour and the Polysemiology of Ali G. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 26(2): 155–77.


Jewell, K. Sue
1993  From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of US Social Policy. New York: Routledge.

Muñoz, José Esteban
1999  Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.


Nero, Charles
2005 Why Are All the Gay Ghettos White? In Black Queer Studies. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, eds. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Rohrer, Seraina
2009 Stereotyping in the films of La India Maria. The Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies 3(3):54-68.