Власть фаллоса
Огромный фаллос Джудит Батлер ебет мой мозг! За то, что огромный фаллос Джудит Батлер ебет мой мозг, мне платят деньги, я могу купить еды и принести моим птенцам. Все мальчики и девочки напились молока и занимаются сексом в тёплых кроватках, одна я подставляю свой мозг огромному фаллосу Джудит Батлер. Нет, я эту порнографию повешу. Чтобы все видели, как ебут студенток в американских универах. Как приходится писать и про фаллос-шмаллос. И про батлер-шматлер.
(Про лесбиянок-трансвеститок, угнетение женщин и моджо Остина Пауэрса.)
In her "Gender is Burning" piece from the "Bodies That Matter" Judith Butler discusses the work that drag performs. According to Butler, agency directed at resisting the hegemonic order of oppression is manifest through resignification. One of the most important operations drag does is this kind of manipulation. Drag denaturalizes gender along with class and race, which according to her don't precede gender but inform it initially. Thus drag queens might produce parodic images of race and class informed masculinity, such as an Ivy League student; a blue-collar executive; a military officer etc. This kind of performativity deconstructs and questions the original to which the parody relates, thus helping to produce new interpretations and visions of all the social categories involved.
Not every kind of drag is subversive and revolutionary. There are types of drag that resubstantiate gender: for example, the figure of preoperative transsexual Latina Venus Xtravaganza from Jennie Livingston's film "Paris is Burning" resubstantiates hegemonic heterosexuality by his/her very desire to transition into a white middle class suburban woman, obedient to his/her husband and relying on him in order to transcend being a gay male of color. These wrong projections lead to his/her death interpreted by Butler as a result of mainstream heterosexuality, preserving safely its borders from the intrusion of the queer.
Other examples of drag performativity are more successful in subverting the norm. Thus, according to Butler, the very resignification of the kinship system in the network of the drag "houses" culture in Harlem of the 1980s she is writing about, performs a task useful for the whole society, including heterosexuals, as it opens ways for new images and ideas helpful in rethinking the family institute, allegedly oppressive to its members in contemporary Western societies.
Halberstam's point about the influence of the drag king culture on the mainstream American imaginary contributes to Butler's and provides empirical evidence of this kind of subversive work at play. Tracing the origins of tropes and images in the British and American comedy, Halberstam demonstrates how the marginal subculture of lesbian transvestites was instrumental in reorienting gender performativity in the larger society through its implicit impact on the movies intended for everyone. The possible way of agency envisioned by her is recognition of these traits in the movies and remembering the contribution of the counterpublic space of king drag that all of us are indebted to.
Halberstam parallels the work of drag kings to that of drag queens. An important contribution of the latter subculture, the so called camp, was previously elaborated in the early work of the anthropologist Esther Newton in her book "Mother Camp." According to Newton, camp is a specific style or manner, explicit not only in specific dress-up, but also in behavior and methods involved in producing specific type of irony and humor. Camp is in the eye of the beholder: thus not only a man can look "campy." Newton draws an example of drag queens relating to Greta Garbo in a way she takes poses as being "campy." Thus camp features certain degree of grotesque, or excessive femininity. It is not just imitation; it is intended as somehow exaggerated imitation and hyperbolization of the feminine.
As Halberstam notes in her piece, the impact of drag queen subculture on the mainstream gender imagery is widely acknowledged. Butler mentions this fact as well in her discussion of the fate of the members of the drag "houses." One of the personages of "Paris is Burning," known as Willie Ninja is shown in the end to become a celebrity featuring in the clips with Madonna. His performance of the effeminate maleness of color appeared to be "passing" as the norms of the mainstream show business got used to this type of masculinity and appropriated it.
At the same time, the input of the transvestite lesbians, the drag kings, was left mostly silenced. As Halberstam points out, only males are let to parody masculinity; females aren't allowed to make fun of it. Thus she sees her goal as unpacking the comedy images that already "passed" in the "majoritarian public spheres" and became a part of the common baggage of images and symbols. She calls the types of the comedies, that, in her opinion, are indebted to drag king subculture "king comedies," in order to celebrate their origin.
Halberstam goes further, inventing a parallel to the "camping" style and behavior that she calls "kinging." It seems that the functions of the two are pretty much the same. Maybe we could speak about some common phenomenon, established in aesthetics of perception. Unfortunately, the author doesn't theorize the ways the two types of excessive gender performativity relate to one another in terms of origin and influences, whether mutual or not.
Austin Powers movie is used by Halberstam as one of the classical examples of king comedies. The image of the super-spy Austin Powers himself is very much informed by the previous developments in the drag king scene. Halberstam points out to the tropes used, such as "de-authentication," "masculine supplementarity," "doubling" and "indexical representation" in order to show how the movie appropriated these techniques, initially used in kinging, for its purposes. She also shows how the very process of appropriation was made possible thanks to historical changes in international relations and in the history of cinematography (such as alluding to and building on the earlier comedy genres and reworking particular previous movie texts).
The very image of Austin Powers is built on a historical gap, i.e. on his being frozen for thirty years in a cryogenic chamber. Thus the performance and perception of the British masculinity of the late1960s is collided with one (actually, now more international one) of the late 1990s. And that older type of masculinity being placed into a new historical and cultural context started looking... queer. This kind of gendered behavior became illegitimate. Austin Powers' image is a powerful synthetic reflection on the contextuality of the gender performance. The older type of masculinity belongs to the late 1960s, that tend to be presented as the revolutionary era, when the boundaries between the genders started blurring as homosexuality arose from the underground, women started somehow gaining power and visibility in the public sphere, and everything got mixed in a multicolor, multisound, psyche- and shagadelic world of rocking, swinging and tuning in.
The world, into which Austin Powers appeared to be inserted now, is very different and it places new demands to the subject's gender performance. It is the time after the AIDS epidemic. I remember the moment when Austin Powers is moving through the time in an automobile from the 1990s back to the 1960s and tells his female partner he is curious what's there in the 1980s. And she tells him: "Believe me, nothing interesting." It's the time of the AIDS epidemic that affected the behavioral norms in the West tremendously. Halberstam names the two main consequences - safe sex and compulsory heterosexuality. I would add compulsory monogamy, that also shows up in the film, and that is expected from Austin in this new life. Both Halberstam and Harper address these stereotypes at work in their articles drawing attention to the manipulation with the public presentation of AIDS as related to promiscuous sex as well as to homosexuality while the issue is just about the safe techniques of sex, without any connection to the number or sex of the partners.
So what is masculine (and how is it masculine) about Austin Powers and what makes his gender representation grotesque? What kind of stereotypical gender(+national) traits does he appropriate to subvert them? I’d like to discuss here one specific issue that Halberstam doesn't discuss, although it seems extremely symbolically important. It relates to the representation of the phallus, or more specifically, the phallic power. As far as Austin's phisical phallus itself is concerned, it is depicted as somehow insufficient. It is small, it needs a penis enlarger, it's not good enough.
What makes Austin Powers sexually powerful is his "mojo," that we probably could translate as gendered sexual energy, sex appeal and sexual performance. Hence the symbol of masculinity he wears as a piece of jewelry. I think that the concept of mojo, as contrasted with the phallus as a conventional attribute of masculinity, being separated from any kind of visible representation, is resignifying the whole human sexual interaction in a radical way. The only visual representation of mojo we can encounter is in the bodily performance. This is the moment, when cyber-female-killers' heads explode incapable of tolerating such a sexy energetic performance of Austin's. But then it means that you really need not to be a man in order to have a mojo. You don't need to have a penis to pass as an ultimate male. You can just do gender - through performance, through reiteration, through excessive repetition in your bodywork such as dressing, the manner of wearing dress, the manner of moving.
This is a kind of revolutionary resolution, the death of the phallus. There is no gender difference any more, no gender trouble. This is very queer. I believe, this is the main replica of the king drag in the movie and an obvious contribution of this subculture through the mainstream medium to the discussion of the gender and performativity.
(Про лесбиянок-трансвеститок, угнетение женщин и моджо Остина Пауэрса.)
In her "Gender is Burning" piece from the "Bodies That Matter" Judith Butler discusses the work that drag performs. According to Butler, agency directed at resisting the hegemonic order of oppression is manifest through resignification. One of the most important operations drag does is this kind of manipulation. Drag denaturalizes gender along with class and race, which according to her don't precede gender but inform it initially. Thus drag queens might produce parodic images of race and class informed masculinity, such as an Ivy League student; a blue-collar executive; a military officer etc. This kind of performativity deconstructs and questions the original to which the parody relates, thus helping to produce new interpretations and visions of all the social categories involved.
Not every kind of drag is subversive and revolutionary. There are types of drag that resubstantiate gender: for example, the figure of preoperative transsexual Latina Venus Xtravaganza from Jennie Livingston's film "Paris is Burning" resubstantiates hegemonic heterosexuality by his/her very desire to transition into a white middle class suburban woman, obedient to his/her husband and relying on him in order to transcend being a gay male of color. These wrong projections lead to his/her death interpreted by Butler as a result of mainstream heterosexuality, preserving safely its borders from the intrusion of the queer.
Other examples of drag performativity are more successful in subverting the norm. Thus, according to Butler, the very resignification of the kinship system in the network of the drag "houses" culture in Harlem of the 1980s she is writing about, performs a task useful for the whole society, including heterosexuals, as it opens ways for new images and ideas helpful in rethinking the family institute, allegedly oppressive to its members in contemporary Western societies.
Halberstam's point about the influence of the drag king culture on the mainstream American imaginary contributes to Butler's and provides empirical evidence of this kind of subversive work at play. Tracing the origins of tropes and images in the British and American comedy, Halberstam demonstrates how the marginal subculture of lesbian transvestites was instrumental in reorienting gender performativity in the larger society through its implicit impact on the movies intended for everyone. The possible way of agency envisioned by her is recognition of these traits in the movies and remembering the contribution of the counterpublic space of king drag that all of us are indebted to.
Halberstam parallels the work of drag kings to that of drag queens. An important contribution of the latter subculture, the so called camp, was previously elaborated in the early work of the anthropologist Esther Newton in her book "Mother Camp." According to Newton, camp is a specific style or manner, explicit not only in specific dress-up, but also in behavior and methods involved in producing specific type of irony and humor. Camp is in the eye of the beholder: thus not only a man can look "campy." Newton draws an example of drag queens relating to Greta Garbo in a way she takes poses as being "campy." Thus camp features certain degree of grotesque, or excessive femininity. It is not just imitation; it is intended as somehow exaggerated imitation and hyperbolization of the feminine.
As Halberstam notes in her piece, the impact of drag queen subculture on the mainstream gender imagery is widely acknowledged. Butler mentions this fact as well in her discussion of the fate of the members of the drag "houses." One of the personages of "Paris is Burning," known as Willie Ninja is shown in the end to become a celebrity featuring in the clips with Madonna. His performance of the effeminate maleness of color appeared to be "passing" as the norms of the mainstream show business got used to this type of masculinity and appropriated it.
At the same time, the input of the transvestite lesbians, the drag kings, was left mostly silenced. As Halberstam points out, only males are let to parody masculinity; females aren't allowed to make fun of it. Thus she sees her goal as unpacking the comedy images that already "passed" in the "majoritarian public spheres" and became a part of the common baggage of images and symbols. She calls the types of the comedies, that, in her opinion, are indebted to drag king subculture "king comedies," in order to celebrate their origin.
Halberstam goes further, inventing a parallel to the "camping" style and behavior that she calls "kinging." It seems that the functions of the two are pretty much the same. Maybe we could speak about some common phenomenon, established in aesthetics of perception. Unfortunately, the author doesn't theorize the ways the two types of excessive gender performativity relate to one another in terms of origin and influences, whether mutual or not.
Austin Powers movie is used by Halberstam as one of the classical examples of king comedies. The image of the super-spy Austin Powers himself is very much informed by the previous developments in the drag king scene. Halberstam points out to the tropes used, such as "de-authentication," "masculine supplementarity," "doubling" and "indexical representation" in order to show how the movie appropriated these techniques, initially used in kinging, for its purposes. She also shows how the very process of appropriation was made possible thanks to historical changes in international relations and in the history of cinematography (such as alluding to and building on the earlier comedy genres and reworking particular previous movie texts).
The very image of Austin Powers is built on a historical gap, i.e. on his being frozen for thirty years in a cryogenic chamber. Thus the performance and perception of the British masculinity of the late1960s is collided with one (actually, now more international one) of the late 1990s. And that older type of masculinity being placed into a new historical and cultural context started looking... queer. This kind of gendered behavior became illegitimate. Austin Powers' image is a powerful synthetic reflection on the contextuality of the gender performance. The older type of masculinity belongs to the late 1960s, that tend to be presented as the revolutionary era, when the boundaries between the genders started blurring as homosexuality arose from the underground, women started somehow gaining power and visibility in the public sphere, and everything got mixed in a multicolor, multisound, psyche- and shagadelic world of rocking, swinging and tuning in.
The world, into which Austin Powers appeared to be inserted now, is very different and it places new demands to the subject's gender performance. It is the time after the AIDS epidemic. I remember the moment when Austin Powers is moving through the time in an automobile from the 1990s back to the 1960s and tells his female partner he is curious what's there in the 1980s. And she tells him: "Believe me, nothing interesting." It's the time of the AIDS epidemic that affected the behavioral norms in the West tremendously. Halberstam names the two main consequences - safe sex and compulsory heterosexuality. I would add compulsory monogamy, that also shows up in the film, and that is expected from Austin in this new life. Both Halberstam and Harper address these stereotypes at work in their articles drawing attention to the manipulation with the public presentation of AIDS as related to promiscuous sex as well as to homosexuality while the issue is just about the safe techniques of sex, without any connection to the number or sex of the partners.
So what is masculine (and how is it masculine) about Austin Powers and what makes his gender representation grotesque? What kind of stereotypical gender(+national) traits does he appropriate to subvert them? I’d like to discuss here one specific issue that Halberstam doesn't discuss, although it seems extremely symbolically important. It relates to the representation of the phallus, or more specifically, the phallic power. As far as Austin's phisical phallus itself is concerned, it is depicted as somehow insufficient. It is small, it needs a penis enlarger, it's not good enough.
What makes Austin Powers sexually powerful is his "mojo," that we probably could translate as gendered sexual energy, sex appeal and sexual performance. Hence the symbol of masculinity he wears as a piece of jewelry. I think that the concept of mojo, as contrasted with the phallus as a conventional attribute of masculinity, being separated from any kind of visible representation, is resignifying the whole human sexual interaction in a radical way. The only visual representation of mojo we can encounter is in the bodily performance. This is the moment, when cyber-female-killers' heads explode incapable of tolerating such a sexy energetic performance of Austin's. But then it means that you really need not to be a man in order to have a mojo. You don't need to have a penis to pass as an ultimate male. You can just do gender - through performance, through reiteration, through excessive repetition in your bodywork such as dressing, the manner of wearing dress, the manner of moving.
This is a kind of revolutionary resolution, the death of the phallus. There is no gender difference any more, no gender trouble. This is very queer. I believe, this is the main replica of the king drag in the movie and an obvious contribution of this subculture through the mainstream medium to the discussion of the gender and performativity.