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.
