Gender Stereotypes In The Film Paris Is Burning By Jennie Livingston

The movie “Paris Is Burning” is a documentary film exploring race, gender, and sexuality within the African-American and Latino gay and transgender communities of the ball culture of New York in the mid-to-late 1980’s. Ball culture is a term used to describe the underground sub-culture of LGBT people who “walk” or compete for trophies in events known as balls. The film chronicles the ostentatiously-arranged competitions in which participants, within a very specific theme, must walk while being judged on criteria such as the authenticity and beauty of their apparel and their dancing ability. Much of the film shows footage of actual balls interspersed with interviews of prominent members of this drag scene. The film shows people of different gender identities and their varied methods of expressing themselves while also exploring how they cope with racism, AIDS, poverty, and homophobia.

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a homosexual subculture, uniquely Afro-American in substance, began to take shape in New York’s Harlem. Throughout the so- called Harlem Renaissance period, roughly 1920 to 1935, black lesbians and gay men were meeting each other [on] street corners, socializing in cabarets and rent parties, and worshiping in church on Sundays, creating a language, a social structure, and a complex network of institutions.” Richard Bruce Nugent, who was considered the “perfumed orchid of the New Negro Movement” said, “You did what you wanted to. Nobody was in the closet. There wasn’t any closet.”

The men and the women of A Tale of Two Cites are violent, loving, cowardly, brave, and ruthless.  Some people are weak and spoiled, while others are badly treated and vindictive.  Many contrasts between men and women can be found within this story.  

3) One of the films would be Erin Brockovich, were Erin is judge for being a single mom based on her appearance she is also label as a whore an example would be Ed that tells her that she looks like someone that likes to have fun, these is of course the stereotypes that society inputs on her. Erin in the film does not meet the ideologies of being femininity and at the end we see that she does succeed at work but her love life and family gets scarified by these.

Intro: Like various art forms such as film, television, and literature allows artists to express their own sense of identity, that being nationality, race, class, ethnicity, gender or sexuality. In this case, Queen uses music to illustrate the themes of gender and sexuality through their music video I Want to Break Free (1983). This essay will attempt to discuss how Queen’s music video, I Want to Break Free, explores queerness in relation to queer theory. Firstly, I will introduce the ideas and arguments of queer theory through Gilbert Herdt article Same Sex Different Cultures (1997). I will then discuss Queen’s portrayal of drag within the music video and how it can be seen as queer rather than heterosexual. Lastly, I will argue that

In the words of RuPaul, one of the most well known drag queens in todays times, “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love someone else.” Since the 1500s, men can be seen dressing up as women for entertainment and comedic effect, but since then drag has evolved from just grand performances to a symbol for acceptance and individuality. Recently, drag has been dissected and looked at under a microscope by those who only see what is on the sparkly surface. What has been found is that drag culture is much more that its initial appearance, but that there is an entire set of values that define what drag truly is, one of which, and probably the most popular, is being confident in ones identity. Being able to take on an alter

Paris is Burning is a film directed by Jennie Livingston, and Livingston attempts to introduce/popularize the drag & ball culture to the world. In her documentary, she explores underground drag queen bars where individuals go to escape the world and cross-dress down a runway, where they are facing no judgment and receive a round of applause for their courage/act/costume. In Bell Hooks’ commentary on this documentary, she dives into the idea that being transgender is “always constructed in the patriarchal mindset as a loss” (Hooks 146). I think that Bell Hooks is undermining the mindset of the “patriarchal” point of view. The year is currently 2017, and the rights that the LBGTQ community has earned/achieved in the last hundred years is an accomplishment that I feel people like Books neglect.

Throughout the week, celebrity flappers such as Lois Long or Clara Bow could talk about their favorite products, clothes, music, and movies. By doing so, they would be endorsing products and their respective companies. Since many flappers engaged in enticing leisure activities previously limited to men; including smoking, drinking, and dancing the Black Bottom and Charleston, stories from their experiences would be very interesting for young women in New York to hear. Everything from flappers’ career ventures to their casual relationship endeavors could inspire the audience to assert their independence and choose the lifestyle they wanted. Adopting a boxy, unisex silhouette that flattened the appearance of their curves defined the flapper’s unusual style of sexualizing androgyny. The flapper’s image challenged traditional values by introducing the idea that women were fearless in their battle for equal rights, thus representing the active feminist movement of the 1920s to empower the radio show’s audience.

George Chauncey’s Gay New York Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940, goes where no other historian had gone before, and that is into the world of homosexuality before World War II. Chauncey’s 1994 critically acclaimed book was a gender history breakthrough that gave light to a homosexual subculture in New York City. The author argues against the idea that homosexual men lived hidden away from the world. Chauncey’s book exposes an abundant culture throughout the United States, especially in New York. In this book Chauncey not only shows how the gay population existed, but “uncovers three widespread myths about the history of gay life before the rise of the gay movement which was isolation, invisibility, and internalization.” Chauncey argues against these theories that in the years 1890-1940, America had in fact a large gay culture. Chauncey book is impactful in the uncovering of a lost culture, but also works as an urban pre-World War II history giving an inside view of life in the city through sexuality and class.

Levy challenges the media and states “And how is imitating a stripper or a porn star, a woman whose job is to intimate arousal in the first place- going to render us sexually liberated?” (145) Women should be modest and only be exotic when in the comfort of their household. During the 1920’s women acted out similarly to the raunch culture era. Those women were labeled Flappers. Women that were flappers smoked and drank liquor in public, cut their hair into bobs and wore short skirts. Smoking in public was considered to be un-ladylike and a women’s long hair was something that identified them. Women who participated in being a flapper were questioned if they were expressing themselves or acting like men. In the 1920’s women’s sexual expression was not as vulgar as it is today. It would be considered sexual liberation rather than sexual exploitation. Women who sexually expressed themselves during that time are viewed to be positive. Certainly, history repeats itself, from the flapper smoking in public to the fifty year old lady celebrating low cut jeans in raunch culture. Today raunch culture has become very explicit and leads one to view women who participate in raunch culture negatively. Levy implies in her essay, “It is worth asking ourselves if this bawdy world of boobs and gams we have resurrected reflects how far we’ve come or how far we have left to go”

In her essay she relates the rise of feminist consciousness in the 1960s to numerous changes in American society, especially the rise of other protest movements. Echols said, “On September 7, 1968, the sixties came to that most apple-pie of American institutions, the Miss America Pageant” (Echols, 308). The reason she said this was because one hundred women’s liberation activists descended upon Atlantic City to protest the pageant’s promotion of physical attractiveness as the primary measure of women’s worth. From there, the protestors set up a “Freedom Trash Can” and filled it with high-heeled shoes, bras, girdles, hair curlers, false eyelashes, typing books, and representative copies of Cosmopolitan, Playboy, and Ladies Home Journal. They wanted to burn the contents but couldn’t because of the laws for bonfires on the boardwalk. Also, word had been leaked to the press that there would be a symbolic bra-burning. However, there were no bras burnt that day. But the image of the bra-burning, militant feminists remains part of our popular mythology about the women’s liberation movement. The Miss America demonstration represents an important moment in the history of the sixties as well as the women’s movement (Echols, 309-310).

Rachel Lee Rubin’s book Well Met chronicles the history of the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, a cultural wellspring in 1960s Los Angeles, and subsequent events modeled after it. Through her research, Rubin shows the reader how the “Faire” has affected American culture, and our lives today. The Faire is set in the Shakespearean Era. One early attendee drew her own connection about the Faire’s setting and the time of its development: “The Faire… had an intellectual focus on the history of an era of awakening from the Dark Ages (just as we were awakening from the Dark Ages of McCarthyism)” (Rubin 23). The Renaissance Faire was a grand experiment in cultural change. In the 60s and into the 70s, healthier body image was promoted, as was more open sexuality,

Within popular culture today, objectified female bodies can be represented everywhere from advertising images to magazine covers, television, music and many more. Through these media institutions, we allow them to construct social identities in ways that allow us to understand what it means to be black, white, Asian, male or female etc. Within many popular culture mediums such as music, stereotypical representations of racially marked female bodies are often formed. Thus, these representations also have the ability to create stories about a certain culture. In music videos, it does not go unnoticed that women are portrayed as objects whose objectives are to pleasure men. In this paper, I will argue how racially marked female bodies are represented. This paper will mainly focus on how these racially marked women are depicted in the hip hop culture. To demonstrate this, I will draw examples by using award winning music videos by Nicki Minaj, R.Kelly, 50 cent to exemplify representations of the female body and how they are objectified as sex objects. In conclusion, we will be able to see how the female bodies are used in mainstream hip hop videos to convey seductively.

For queer theorists, identity has been constructed through performativity, which is based on the opinion of Judith Butler. Butler (1990, p.25) believed that “ there is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” In other words, there is not any factor to produce the identity, but identity creates itself through performativity. One should imitate and repeat the gender expression again and again according to norms, then the identity will be constituted, which also shows that identity is fluid and constructed. Moreover, Jenkins (2000,2004) stated that a dynamic social process generates identity, so identity is not static but fluid and dynamic.

Good morning everyone. I’m Savannah, I hope you all are just as excited as I am to start off our speeches. I would like to take a moment and ask you all to close your and relax, take a deep breath think about a time when you felt truly comfortable, safe, and at peace. Now open your eyes. Where were you? It may be at the sunny beach, the calming lake, the lush woods, or even that warm bed you left this morning. For me that place is a club watching a drag show. Surprising right? Does anyone here know what a drag queen is? A drag queen is defined by the Merriam Webster dictionary as usually a homosexual male dressing up as a woman and performing for entertainment. While that may be the case drag is so much more than just a man in makeup and a dress. The art of drag is inclusive, builds an open and safe community, and gives a platform to speak up and give back.