Query 4C.
How does "realness" function in the film? How does understanding "realness" as a standard (or goal to acheive) reinforce and/or subvert notions of what it means to be normal/acceptable/intelligible/proper?
Think about these questions in relation to this quotation from Butler:
The rules that regulate and legitimate realness constitute the mechanism by which certain sanctioned fantasies, sanctioned imaginaries, are insidiously elevated as the parameters of realness (130).
What is realness?
In order to think about how to describe the mess of what exactly realness is, I'm trying a little exercise of unraveling *ahem* real gender, relatively citation free. Here goes.
Doing this real gender is a process infatuated with what it means to be "normal/acceptable/intelligible/proper." And the irreducible fact seems to be that in order to perform, to pass as a real gender, everything (or every appearance, at least) must align (one must do strictly feminine or strictly masculine, though there may become multiple ways of doing so). In effect, this means an erasure of all disruptions, all things contrary; if some aspect will not be "erased" or pushed to the background (ie. a woman who wears pants), then this fissure must be sealed by its reinforced relation to the more important reality (she is still a woman), that birthright of a marker of sex/gender.
In the balls of Paris Is Burning, realness seems to be judged and prized in precisely this way: by the neat balance of signals sent by the sum of all (predominantly white, predominantly middle to upper class) gendered cues, down to the very last detail (note: one's coat must button on the "proper" side). Though there may be multiple ways of doing so, there is also only one way. How can there be only one, you ask? The way must radiate white middle to upper class heterosexuality and heterosexual desire. The way doesn't have room for mixing signals.
Let's take for example the adoption of military dress/uniforms, pre-appropriation already a site of restriction and its own one way system, and in the context of the ball just as serious. The folks dressed, walking, performing as military (army, navy, they all run together for me) officers must follow all the rules to pass as real, to not be read. Already we have a problem: how does one go about passing as the reality of one's being? Or, if not how, why? Why does this reality concern itself with audience perception? For it is somewhat clear that the genders performed in the ball setting most certainly carry through to other situations for at least some performers. Further, the film presents no images of folks in military regalia mixing in symbols of liberation or gay/queer/trans identities: no pink, no piercings, no rainbows, no flagging hankies. Those would throw their realness into question.
What seems to emerge is a process in which what is real (gender) is in fact the suppression, the denial, the fear of anything that throws off the alignment with a real heteronormative femininity or masculinity. A point for more prodding here is perhaps that this process necessitates a reiterated performance, a covering up, an act sometimes viewed as a deception.The very hierarchical, white, heteronormative realness so awarded in the balls of Paris is Burning produces very different scenarios on the streets.
I'll close with this open-ended bit on perceived deception (which is also in the spoken/unspoken history of Venus Xtravaganza in Paris is Burning). Some of you probably know that in the early history of Leslie Feinberg's health struggles, ze was refused medical treatment in a very transphobic way. What I learned only recently is that this series of events occurred during hir speaking engagement at the U of M in 1995 (VHS recording on hand in the GLBTA Programs Office in Appleby Hall). According to my secondhand source, when Leslie sought treatment at a local hospital ze initially passed as male. When the reportedly masculine -identified and -presenting doctor learned the real reality of Leslie's body, however, Leslie was asked to leave and refused any diagnosis or treatment on the basis of hir "deception" of the doctor. Is there a price that comes with doing a real gender which runs the risk of being undone by perception?
For Venus there was.
Rather than what realness is, I want to know what it does.
("Rather than what 'realness' is, I want to know what it does.")
This is a much, much more troubling question than "what is realness?" -- which was already troubling and tormenting me. I think you've actually answered both of these questions quite nicely and productively. Both this entry and your above discussion of "The G word" have succinctly clarified what "realness" can be as well as what it can do. If realness constitutes what is written on the body (ie, genitalia) then what it does-- when our gender performance does not overtly announce what lies below-- is make us abject. We become the horrors that haunt The Inner Circle of "life". Your discussion has also helped me see how abjection actually works in "real" situations, not just as an abstract or metaphorical idea. These two examples show what it means when the "boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity-differentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit" (GT, 182). Leslie Feinberg is refused medical attention because if the "normal", or residents of the Inner Circle were to "allow" the "abnormal" to reside with its borders, it would risk explosion. The abject must be expelled, or refused medical care. But when the abject are expelled as waste and that results from the refusal of a space in which the abject can expel their waste... what happens then?
I know the intense anxiety I suffer from being in an unfamiliar public place where toilets of any kind cannot be found -- but I know they exist somewhere. And there is an emblem (with a figure that I do not identify with at all but) which grants me access to its facilities because my appearance suggests that I possess the same genitalia as that "feminine" figure on the door -- So if I feel anxious about where to pee despite knowing that a safe and (hopefully) sanitary place exists for me to do so just about anywhere I go, then I can't imagine how I would feel if I knew there were no bathrooms where I would, without question or concern, be permitted access, or where it may not be safe for me to enter into.
I don't know if this comment is at all productive, but this discussion is important to me -- about the boundaries that exist (or do not exist) between reality and illusion, the "intelligible" and the "queer". The article I'm reading for my presentation on abject is about these borders and their existence/nonexistence, the reality of them and the illusion of them. Your discussion about Leslie Feinberg illustrates very clearly that these borders cannot be definitive, because the "categories" on either side of the borders are not binary pairs, nor are they necessarily dichotomous. It seems to me the real deceit in this example was not on the part of the patient --who, by requesting medical attention when it was in fact needed, was as honest as is necessary -- but on the part of the doctor, who claimed to be a person whose job it is to provide care for other persons, and then took it back when confronted with what may have been an awkward -- but harmless -- situation.