ButlerBodiesThatMatterEx. Ball culture - Wikipedia. Houses[edit] Houses, also called "families", are LGBTQ groups which band together under a "house mother" (sometimes a drag queen or transgender person) or "house father".[1][4] According to Bailey (2013), the gender system is a collection of gender and sexual subjectivities that extend beyond the binary categories of dominant society such as male/female, gay/lesbian, man/woman etc.
A member chooses to identify with a certain category based on their walk (performance). This system includes six categories: Butch Queens, Femme Queens, Butch Queens up in Drag, Butches, Women, Men and house parents. Those in the women category are primarily straight, feminine lesbians or queer. Overall, the gender system does not completely break from the hegemonic norms of sex, gender and sexuality, but it offers more gender and sexual identities from which to choose.The gender system specially serves to define what role members play in the house. According to the Village Voice: Competition[edit] Runway[edit] Queens and queers: The rise of drag ball culture in the 1920s. While watching a screening of Paris is Burning hosted by the Smithsonian Latino Center, I was entranced by the dazzling participants as they competed, fiercely owning the floor in their glamorous gowns. Twenty-five years ago, this famous cult documentary captured the lives and culture of African American, Latino, gay, and transgender communities involved in New York City drag balls.
The film captured a slice of the 1980s unknown to many, with roots in a fascinating culture. In 1869, within Harlem's Hamilton Lodge, drag balls began. As the secret of the balls spread within the gay community, they became a safe place for gay men to congregate. Harlem nightclub dancers, 1937, in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. By the 1920s, the balls had gained more public visibility. Magazine photos of drag queens preparing for a performance in the "Female Mimics," volume 5, issue 3, from 1974. The balls were crucial in the creation and maintenance of LGBTQ culture. Dorian Corey and Bobby Worley: The Mummy In The Trunk : UnresolvedMysteries. Paris Has Burned. LOOKING like endangered birds, the drag queens tottered on their heels as they entered -- "a bit early in the day for we girls," said one.
It was noon on a recent Saturday at the Sound Factory Bar on West 21st Street, and they were attending a memorial for Angie Xtravaganza. One of her children, Hector Xtravaganza, kept breaking down in tears. "It's not just her, it's all of them," he said. "My entire gay childhood is disintegrating before my eyes. " Indeed, as some of the 100 mourners rose to reminisce, it was as if their whole world, the world of drag queens and voguing and ecstatic, elaborate balls, had died along with Angie. Though she was only 27, Angie had been a mother more than a dozen times.
Drag balls, the product of a poor, gay and mostly nonwhite culture, had been held in Harlem since the 1920's. But it wasn't just Angie. Paris is no longer burning. The film's critical and financial success should therefore not be taken for the success of its subjects. And drag queens can't. Tongues Untied - Wikipedia. Tongues Untied is a 1989 semi-documentary film directed by Marlon Riggs. The film seeks, in its author's words to, "...shatter the nation's brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference. " To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Teddy Awards, the film has been selected to be shown at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2016.[1] Content[edit] The film blends documentary footage with personal account and fiction in an attempt to depict the specificity of black gay identity.
The "silence" referred to throughout the film is that of black gay men, who are unable to express themselves because of the prejudices of white and black heterosexual society, as well as the white gay society. The narrative structure of Tongues Untied is both interesting and unconventional. The documentary dealt with the simultaneous critique of the politics of racism, homophobia and exclusion as they are intertwined with contemporary sexual politics. Release and reception[edit] Coffee Rhetoric: Revisiting 'Paris Is Burning': Sifting Through The Ashes.
Paris Is Burning … a documentary I've seen countless times over the years, having watched it as recently as this past Thursday night at 2:00 A.M. to lull myself to sleep and then three times Monday night, to delve deeper for the sake of this post. It’s one of those documentary film experiences I still appreciate to this day for the candidness provided by its subjects and for introducing me to the intricacies of a subculture that often goes unaccredited for the ways in which it helped shape a lot of popular culture, music, and vernacular.
It continued to leave me with lingering questions about Jennie Livingston’s approach to and motivation for culling the information during that moment in space and time; and more importantly, what happened to the subjects that shaped Livingston’s documentary and provided a quintessential work to be deconstructed by cinephiles, writers, and scholars alike, 22 years later. “This is white America” narrates a ball participant. “(…) I am now a filmmaker. “Frog and Toad”: An Amphibious Celebration of Same-Sex Love. On a cool autumn day, a frog and a toad awake in their separate houses to find that their yards are filled with fallen leaves. The frog and toad (conveniently named Frog and Toad) see each other every day, and are particularly synchronized: rather than clean his own yard, each decides to go to the other’s house to rake up the leaves there as a kind surprise for his friend.
But, unbeknown to either of them, after the raking is done and as they are walking back to their respective homes, a wind comes and undoes all of their hard work, leaving their yards as leaf-strewn as they were at the beginning. Neither has any way of knowing of the other’s helpful act, and neither knows that his own helpful act has been erased. But Frog and Toad both feel satisfied believing that they have done the other a good turn. This story, called “The Surprise,” appears in “Frog and Toad All Year,” an illustrated book of children’s stories by Arnold Lobel that was first published in 1976. Before European Christians Forced Gender Roles, Native Americans Acknowledged 5 Genders. It wasn’t until Europeans took over North America that natives adopted the ideas of gender roles. For Native Americans, there was no set of rules that men and women had to abide by in order to be considered a “normal” member of their tribe.
In fact, people who had both female and male characteristics were viewed as gifted by nature, and therefore, able to see both sides of everything. According to Indian Country Today, all native communities acknowledged the following gender roles: “Female, male, Two Spirit female, Two Spirit male and Transgendered.” “Each tribe has their own specific term, but there was a need for a universal term that the general population could understand.
The Navajo refer to Two Spirits as Nádleehí (one who is transformed), among the Lakota is Winkté (indicative of a male who has a compulsion to behave as a female), Niizh Manidoowag (two spirit) in Ojibwe, Hemaneh (half man, half woman) in Cheyenne, to name a few. Transgender women of Paris in the Fifties and Sixties. These beautiful photographs of transgender women, in Paris from the late 1950s and early 1960s were taken by Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm, who traveled to Paris in the late-fifties, where he hoped to create a new kind of night-life street photography. Strömholm lived in the Red Light district, around Place Blanche and Pigalle, where he made friends with many of the young transgender women who worked the streets and hotels to make a living.
In 1983, Strömholm published many of these photographs in his book Les Amies de Place Blanche. In his introduction to the book he wrote: “This is a book about the quest for self-identity, about the right to live, about the right to own and control one’s body. ...These are images of people whose lives I shared and whom I think I understood. The whole collection can be seen here. Via Buzzfeed, with thanks to Tony Vermillion! Bechdel test. A measure of the representation of women in fiction The Bechdel test ( BEK-dəl),[1] also known as the Bechdel–Wallace test,[2] is a measure of the representation of women in fiction. It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man.
The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added.[3] About half of all films meet these criteria, according to user-edited databases and the media industry press. The test is named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel in whose comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For the test first appeared in 1985. History[edit] Gender portrayal in popular fiction[edit] Female and male characters in film, according to four studies In her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf observed about the literature of her time what the Bechdel test would later highlight in more recent fiction:[4] Criteria and variants[edit] The other woman acknowledges that the idea is pretty strict, but good. El Género en Disputa.