1 After a successful six- month run at the Film Forum in New York City, Paris is Burning (1990) is now being distributed by Paramount. Its important and groundbreaking survey of a drastically under- represented subject raises crucial questions concerning political and representational strategies informed by issues of otherness.

2 Frequently shown on MTV and included in Madonna: The Immaculate Collection, Warner Reprise Video, 1990.

3 Despite its repeated broadcast on a few PBS stations throughout the United States, Tongues Untied (1989) is still being censored by most of the PBS affiliates. The video version is distributed by Framelines.

You may not approve of the Orient but it's half of the world and it's where spaghetti came from.

Jack Smith 'The Perfect Filmic

Appositeness of Maria Montez'

If. ..a regular woman wants her husband to buy her a washer-and-dryer set... She's gonna have to go to bed with him, anyway, to give him what he wants in order to get what she wants. So, in the long run, it all turns out the same way.

Venus Extravaganza Paris Is Burning

Vogueing — the dance fad, the (sub)cultural practice — is not the object of this essay; rather, it designates a knowledge practice contiguous to our own. As such, our concern is not to define vogueing, but to elaborate upon the relations among some of the discourses implicated in it as a performance. The various representations of vogueing in recent film and video, particularly Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning,'1 but also Madonna'a Vogue2 and Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied,3 among others, enable our elaboration not so much because they unproblematically reflect vogueing, but because they initiate their own discourses (theorisations) of it. Thus, they provide the occasion for a critique which marks vogueing as a site of intersection for the categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

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4 See Marco Becquer, 'Snaplthology and Other Discursive Practices in Tongues Untied', Wide Angle, Vol 13, No 2, April 1991, p 6.

5 In Paris is Burning.

6 Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, Springfield, Mass, 1981, p 1106.

Vogueing can be briefly described as a dance which is practised both casually, at gathering places like the pier in Greenwich Village (shown in Tongues Untied), night-dubs and even subway cars; and more formally, at events called balls (shown in Paris Is Burning) where it serves as a means of challenge between deferent 'houses' (or 'gangs') of poor, young black and hispanic gays. At balls, voguers compete for 'realness'4 in such categories as, e.g., 'banjee-realness', 'executive-realness', 'high fashion Parisian', 'luscious body-realness' and even 'butch queen first time in drag at a ball'. As deciphered by Willie Ninja, a voguer featured in some of the above-mentioned films and videos, vogueing brings together poses from the magazine of the same name, breakdancing moves, and gestures represented in Egyptian hieroglyphics.5 Vogueing, then, articulates, in a particular form, discursive practices usually associated with diverse social, historical and ethnic contexts. By 'articulation', here, we mean a practice which both speaks and links a set of elements whose historically shifting identities are modified in the process of being articulated.*

Recent works dealing with identity politics have deployed the concept of hybridity in an effort to foreground the non-essentiality of composite articulations like vogueing. These works are involved in a critical project which would contest, through the celebration and radicalization of the hybrid, essentialist notions of ethnic and cultural identity.** Few, if any of these works however, have directly addressed or critiqued the ideological baggage with which hybridity comes equipped.

Etymologically linked to animal husbandry and agriculture, for instance, hybridity may, and often does, still presuppose the 'pure' origin of elements — that is, their fixed, essential identities — prior to their hybridization. As one of the definitions found in Webster's Dictionary clarifies, a hybrid is "an offspring of two animals or plants of different races, breeds, varieties, species, or genera."6 Hence, hybridity may not imply the erasure of essentialism in the hybridized "offspring" as much

* Cf. Emesto Ladau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso, London, 1985, p 105. See also Lawrence Grossberg, 'On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall', Journal of Communication Inquiry, Summer 1986, p 53; Hall: "An articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? So the so-called 'unity' of a discourse is really the articulation of different distinct elements which can be articulation of different ways because they have no necessary 'belongingness'." And Dick Hebdidge, Hiding in the Light, Routledge, London, 1988, p 205: "[Articulation] is . . .a continually shifting, mediated relation between groups and classes, a structured field and set of lived relations in which complex ideological formations composed of elements derived from diverse sources have to be actively combined, dismantled, bricolaged, so that new politically effective alliances can be secured between different fractional groupings which can themselves no longer be returned to static, homogeneous classes."

** See, for example, Essex Hemphill, 'Looking for Langshton: An interview, with Isaac Julien', in Essex Hemphill (ed.), Brother to Brother, Alyson Publications, Boston, 1991; Cornel West, 'The New Cultural Politics of Difference', October, No 53, Summer 1990; and Becquer (see note 4). In gay-affirmative contexts, the analytical use of hybridity may appear as a particularly bold and ironic appropriation, since, archetypically, hybrids are marked by their sterility and unnaturalness (eg, the mule as the sterile offspring of the horse and the donkey). Yet, the hybrid is most often produced (conceptually, and for its 'utility') in and by a relational system that not necessarily is, but defines itself and exerts its power, in opposition to the homosexual.

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From left to right: Angie Xtravaganza, David Xtravaganza. Kim Pendavis, Pepper Labeija, Octavia Saint Laurent, Freddie Pendavis, Junior Labeija, Dorian Corey and Willi Ninja, co-stars of PARIS IS BURNING, a film by Jennie Livingston.

Photographed by Michel Comte

PRESTIGE A DIVISION OF MIRAMAX FILMS

A Pr»itig. b U o i t O 1991

as it might merely temporarily defer such essentialism onto parents which have been discreetly classified into 'static, homogeneous' categories.

Moreover, this more or less straightforward reference to parents and offspring threatens to reinforce the ultimate essentialism of sexual(ity) difference, even as it might highlight the heterogeneity of ethnic and

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Tongues Untied courtsey: Frameline, San Francisco

7 For a critique of essentialist representations of sexual difference, see the work of Judith Butler, eg, Gender Trouble: Femininism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 1990; and also Chris Straayer, 'The She-Man: Postmodern Bi-Sexed Performance in Film and Video', Screen, Vol 31, No 3, 1990.

8 'Power and Strategies', in Colin Gorden (ed.), Power/Knowledge, Pantheon, New York, 1980, pp 143-144.

cultural identity.7 In this sense, hybridity harbors the danger of contributing to the hegemony of the heterosexist metaphor which also informs numerous, oft-cited theories of the natural and of material relations. The specific logic implicit here, that two contrasting entities 'come' together to produce a third, masquerades as both universal and transhistorical. It is akin to what Foucault has called "the meagre logic of contradiction", an Aristotelian notion that has enjoyed special prominence since the nineteenth century, and of which he finds evidence in "the sterilising constraints of the dialectic."8 Indeed, such logic can be seen to naturalize not only dominant, teleological conceptions of progress and evolution (which are also germane to eugenicist notions of ethnic and cultural purity), but also totalizing and reductive accounts of the mechanisms of struggle which privilege conflict as the means of change. The prevalence of theories of historical development and social transformation informed by such logic no doubt plays a role in the maintenance of the current hierarchical forms of subjectivity.*

Thus, while we do not reject conflict as a form of struggle, we question its privileged epistemological status in the presently dominant regime of

* In terms of historical development, what we are referring to here is a certain conception of dialectics where the term describes the operation of a teleological system which fixes the identities of the elements a priori by reducing their relations to a contradiction; the telos thus serves to reslove that contradiction, by what Laclau and Mouffe call a (Hegelian) 'cunning of reason'. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, op cit, p 95. In terms of social transformation we are referring, for instance, to Gramsci's distinction between 'war of manoeuvre' and the favor it has enjoyed (presumably due to fear of 'recuperation') over 'war of position' in theorizing struggle. In our view, war of manoeuvre reduces struggle to contradiction and aims at attaining a spectacular (though temporary) victory over oppression instantly; war of position involves a more thorough and strategic, if never totally negational, approach to struggle. See Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, New York, 1989, p 233. See also Stuart Hall, 'Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity', Journal of Communication Inquiry, Summer 1986, p 17.

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9 It is in this sense that syncretism, as it is developed here, may act as a foil to the contradictory logics of the essentialism/anti- essentialism debates. Often the structure of these debates sets up essentiality as presence and anti-essentiality as absence, thus precipitating the notion that if differences are not fixed, they are lost or disappear.

truth. It is our contention that the power relations implicit in vogueing exceed autotelic logics of contradiction and synthesis, and challenge the hegemony such hetero-logics enjoy. Indeed, considering the subject position(alitie)s occupied by vogueing's (sub)cultural practitioners, and the ones they embrace (and critique, but don't simply contradict) as they traverse sexualities, genders, races and classes in performance, we feel the demand for more nuanced understandings of resistance processes and strategies. Here lies the importance of vogueing (and similar articulations) to the project of thinking struggle.

As a politico-aesthetic characterisation of articulatory discourses such as vogueing, the concept of syncretism may prove more suggestive than hybridity. Though the two terms have often been used interchangeably, we would like to stress some important differences between them.* The etymology of syncretism points to the tactical articulation of different elements, exemplified in Plutarch by the communities of ancient Crete which, despite their differences, joined to face a common enemy. Thus, syncretism foregrounds the political — rather than the (un)natural — paradigm of articulation and identity, a paradigm under which the factional inhabitants of Crete, rather than forming a homogeneous whole, compose a heterogeneous front of distinct communities in altered relations to each other. As such, the discursive alignment implicit in syncretism remains contingent to relations of power and subject to change according to historical specificity; the elements united in it are denied any a priori 'necessary belongingness', and are precluded any sense of an originary fixity both to their identities and to their relations. In this manner, syncretism designates articulation as a politicized and discontinuous mode of becoming. It entails the 'formal' coexistence of components whose precarious (i.e., partial as opposed to impartial) identities are mutually modified in their encounter, yet whose distinguishing differences, as such, are not dissolved or elided in these modifications, but strategically reconstituted in an ongoing war of position.9

Insofar as syncretism thus testifies to its elements' permeable boundaries,

* See, for example, Manthia Diawara, who gives the two terms equal signified in 'The Nature of Mother in Dreaming Rivers', Third Text, No 13, Winter 1990/1991, p 82: "The hybrid, which is synonymous with the Creole, the syncretic, and the symbiotic in the works of the Negritude poets, as well as some Black British artists and cultural workers, is the product of several cultures." See also Kobena Mercer's essay, 'Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination: the Aesthetics of Black Independent Film in Britain', Blackframes, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1988, p 57: "Across a whole range of cultural forms there is a 'syncretic' dynamic which critically appropriates elements from the mastercodes of the dominant culture and 'creolises' them, disarticulating given signs and re-articulating their symbolic meaning otherwise. The subversive force of this hybridising tendency is most apparent at the level of language itself..."; Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union lack, Hutchinson, London, 1987, especially the chapter entitled 'Diaspora, Utopia and the critique of capitalism'; and Robert Stam, 'Bakhtin, Polyphony, and Ethnic/Racial Representation', in Lester Friedmann, Unspeakable Images, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1991, p 266.

In calling attention to the differences between the two terms we do not mean to polarize them. Rather, we would indicate that their alleged synonymity may well be read as a symptom of the recent binaristic essentialism/anti-essentialism debates which frame them. The 'offspring' of these debates has, more often than not, been a subject conceived as passive receptacle of identity — a subject who is either entirely 'interpellated' or totally pre-given — and whose pleasures are, in any case, demonized as her desire is mystified. Our attempt to reformulate syncretism, here, reintroduces the agency of the subject into the politics of desire and the struggle over her own social identities.

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10 Even though syncretism has, since Plutarch, been mentioned by different authors (such as Erasmus), it gained currency in nineteenth century religious studies. See Colpe, p 218.

the political and methodological efficacy of strict relations of contradiction/complementarity between identities presumed fixed (as in, say, dominant models of heterosexuality and/or objectivist dialectics — often functioning as undergirding structures for subordinations in the social) can be radically questioned. It is this implicit relational challenge that most dramatically distinguishes syncretism from hybridity as well as synthesis.* The latter are the privileged features of a closed system in which elements given distinct, diametrical identities clash, and definitively resolve their contrast in the (re)production of a 'higher unity' external to them. This resolution is, of course, guaranteed by the 'pure', positive differentiation of the elements in the first place, ie, their externality in relation to each other and their internality to the system which assigns and contains their identities. As moments of resolution in this system, hybridity and synthesis potentially dissimulate and bypass contingent power asymmetries which engender and particularize struggle. Syncretism, on the other hand, signals, not the pre-ordained telos of a redemptive higher unity contained within a diachronic self-unfolding, but the historicized interchange between elements based on the complex play of differences and affinities in a collective will to hegemonize.

However, the concept of syncretism has been used in many different ways since Plutarch wrote the history of the Cretans. During the period of expansion of European colonialism, for instance, when ethnography was deployed to describe colonized peoples, syncretism defined a stage of evolution (progress), serving to explain the ways 'uncivilized' societies 'assimilated' more 'advanced' cultures. Thus ethnographers, following a tradition established since the Counter-Reformation,10 labelled as syncretic religious practices which articulated the symbols of different religions in complex iconologies. Here, as syncretism was reduced to a 'transitional' moment within a stagist progression, a psychologists shift was additionally imposed on its meaning — a shift which , in taking recourse to a rationale of (under)development, ultimately accounted for dia-logics among cultures in terms of contra-logics.** Hence, it was

* Even though Roger Bastide equates syncretism with synthesis in his essay 'Estudo do Sincretismo Catolio-Fetichista', Estudos Afro-Bmsileiros, Perspectiva, Sao Paulo, 1983, p 188, Carsten Colpe makes a careful distinction between the two concepts, stating that the "reconciliation of cultures or an integration of cultures into a higher unity are better represented by the term synthesis, which . . . is to be understood as a complex of synthetic phenomena." — 'Syncretism' in Mircea Eliade (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion, MacMillan Publishing Company, New York, 1987, Vol 14, p 221.

** As that floating signifier 'civilization' is contested and resecured from the 'threatening' vacillations of the 'natural' (feminine) and the 'unnatural' (homosexual) which circumscribe it in its relations to the 'primitive', we witness in contra-logics the conditions both for the 'feminization' (the other there to be penetrated) and the 'homosexualization' (the other as exotic and marked by esoteric practices) of the colonized. See, for instance, Ella Shohat, 'Imaging Terra Incognita: The Disciplinary Gaze of the Empire', Public Culture, Vol 3, No 2, Spring 1991; and 'Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema', QRFV, Vol 13, Nos 1-3, 1991; Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle, Penguin, New York, 1990; Simon Watney, 'Missionary Positions: AIDS, Africa and Race', Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1990.

Indeed, the concept of (under)development 'neatly' encapsulates the imbrication of race(ist) and (hetero)sex(ist) discourses (in)coherently articulated under the majesty of an imperial rationalism by the power/knowledge mechanisms engendered in the nineteenth century sociological tradition — a tradition that assumed the positivity and objectivity of social relations. It implies at once a state closer to nature (ie, feminine), immature or arrested in progress (ie, homosexual), as well as ungainly economic conditions.

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11 A discursive split once again at work in current scientific and media representations of AIDS; see Paula Treichler, 'AIDS, Homophobia and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification', in Douglas Crimp (ed.), AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1988, p 63.

typically — and paternalistically — assumed that the colonized, attempting to thwart the colonizers' religious prohibitions, simply disguised their own deities with the (culturally contrasting) accoutrements of European iconography. Classic examples of such syncretisms include the matron saint of Cuba, La Virgen di La Caridad del Cobre, also known as the Yoruba goddess Oshum; and Saint George, who in Brazil is known as Ogum, the warrior god of West Africans.*

Explanatory constructions like the rhetoric of disguise and its justification as 'development' bespeak the centrality of (and the anxiety over) the concept of authenticity in the ethnographic production of the other. Under the aegis of the long-sedimented model of contradiction and its concomitant reification of differences, the lingering effectivity of such rationalizations is no doubt enhanced by their ability both to maintain what is and is not, in this case, European (self/not self),11 and to regulate what may and may not achieve the status of 'symmetrical correspondence'. Such critical policing of difference and identification does not only (re)erect the binary opposition of the two terms; it also, of course, (re)institutes the subordination of the latter to the former, thereby securing the value of, and the means by which to locate the 'authentic' or 'pure' other. Thus, under this representational schema (and reinforced by the Eurocentric privileging of the visual as unmediated knowledge), resemblances among the costumes and accessories of certain icons in the syncretized pantheons were, for instance, 'commonsensically' assumed to account for the 'motivations' behind syncretisms. Meanwhile, what may have been more subtle and complex connections and articulations based on, say, theocratic, theosophist and/or other politico-religious principles were ignored as irrational, contradictory, or intellectually inaccessible to the (as yet) underdeveloped other. Nevertheless, syncretisms continue to challenge the 'transcendental' stability of concepts like identity and difference. In Cuba, as well as in parts of Brazil, for example, the powerful Shango, god of justice and thunder, is syncretized with Saint Barbara — an event which confounds, even of the visual level, both the regulation of identification and the maintenance of difference in terms of the traditionally fixed notions of gender (in both Europe and Africa).

It has been significantly due to an ethnography nostalgic for ever-fleeting cultural and ethnic 'purity' that syncretism has gained a derogatory weight, distancing it from its etymology. The ideological effects of this operation, by which the technologies of (post)colonialism have emptied the concept of its political content in a rhetorical manoeuvre casting alignment and resistance as contradiction, is made evident in the present dictionary definitions of syncretism: "flagrant compromise in religion or philosophy; eclecticism that is illogical or leads to inconsistency; uncritical

* For an account of the transformations of African religions facing colonial prohibitions, see Roger Bastide, op cit, p 188. For a recent example of ethnographic work that 'explains' syncretisms as acceptance of the colonizer's superiority, see Hugo Nutini, Todos Santos In Rural Tlaxcala, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1988, p 404ss. On syncretism in Cuba, see the works of Lydia Cabrera, eg, Yemaya y Ochun, C&R, New York, 1980. For a politicized rendering of Ogum/Saint George, see the film Antonio das Mortes by Glauber Rocha, 1968. A more extended account of syncretism in Rocha's works is now in progress (Jose Gatti, Dialogism and Syncretism in the Films of Glauber Rocha, doctoral dissertation for the Department of Cinema Studies, New York University, forthcoming).

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12 Webster's Dictionary, p 2319. For Eurocentric science, the articulatory practices of subaltern peoples were taken as illegitimate and contradictory acts, much in the same way that their oral history, was considered when compared to the colonizer's written history.

13 O Terreiro e a Cidade, Vozes, Petropolis, 1988, p 99. (our translation)

acceptance."12

In the African diaspora, the responses to such colonialist distortions are varied. On the one hand, there have been some attempts to propose alternatives to syncretism as an analytical tool. To mention but a recent one, Brazilian scholar Muniz Sodre offers the concept of 'plasticity' as one of the distinctive features of West African religious and cultural systems, which has kept them open to dialogic interaction. This plasticity, Sodre suggests, has been "used as a resource by an Africanist continuum in exile, "for both survival and adaptation.13 On the other hand, a vast diasporic literature (as well as filmography) has also appropriated syncretism by simply casting aside the standards of authenticity and charges of (illogical, primitive) contradiction that mark its use by colonialist ethnography.* While we maintain the designation of cultural and/or religious practices, like the ones previously mentioned, as 'syncretic', we argue here for a repoliticization of the concept — which may be accomplished not only by retracing the word's etymology, but also by problematizing its historical deployment.

Hence, we propose a reinscription of the contact between, for example, European and African symbolic systems in syncretic articulations, not as contradictory but as antagonistic, i.e., in relations which are animated by the partial presence of the other within the self, such that the differential identity of each term is at once enabled and prevented from full constitution.** These relations, which, depending on the configurations of power in contingent historical conditions, may or may not crystallize into oppositionalities, exist both horizontally (in equivalential alignments among diverse groups united in struggle, as in the Cretan example) as well as vertically (in dominant/subaltern confrontations, as in colonialism). Antagonistic relation, then, indicate the limits of absolutist conceptions of culture based upon a closed system of unalloyed, hetero-topic differences, and thereby expand the logics of struggle.

* The bibliography is especially extensive in Spanish, Portuguese and French (such as the ethnographic works of Edison Carneiro, Lydia Cabrera, Roger Bastide, Pierre Verger and others). Michael Chanan, in The Cuban Image, BFI, London, 1985, pp 267-269, makes interesting comparisons between the use of the term syncretism in Europe and Latin America. The novels by Jorge Amado, which often deal with syncretic practices, have all been translated into English. Umberto Eco's recent novel, Foucault's Pendulum, Ballantine Books, New York, 1990, pp 147-155, also addresses the subject of Brazilian syncretisms. For a recent example of the use of syncretism applied to the plastic arts in Cuba, see Osvaldo Sanchez, 'Restoring our Otherness', Third Text, No 13, Winter 1990-91. The cinemas of Brazil and Cuba have produced many films dealing directly with syncretic religious manifestations, especially in the 60s and 70s. Hollywood has released a number of films that treat syncretic religious practices with the codes of the horror genre (which says a lot about their ideological perspective, but very little — or nothing — about syncretic practices); among the most recent are The Serpent and the Rainbow (Wes Craven, 1987), which blends Haitian 'religion', Amazonian 'witchcraft', politics and horror; and The Believers (John Schlesinger, 1980), an unfortuante depiction of santeria in New York City.

** See Laclau and Mouffle, op cit., p 125: "Insofar as there is antagonism, I cannot be a full presence for myself. But nor is the force that antagonizes me such a presence: its objective being as a symbol of my non-being and, in this way, it is overflowed by a plurality of meanings which prevent its being fixed as a full positivity. Real opposition is an objective relation — that is, determinable, definable — among things; contradiction is an equally definable relation among concepts; antagonism constitutes the limits of every objectivity, which is revealed as partial and precarious objectipcation."

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Dorian Corey and Willi Ninja, co-stars of PARIS IS BURNING, a film by Jennie Livingston.

Photographed by Michel Comte

PRESTIGE A DtVISION OF MIRAMAX FILMS

A PrM*«* b U o M C 1991

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14 'Flaming Closets', October, No 51, Winter 1989, p 54.

15 Clyde Taylor, 'Black Cinema in the Post- aesthetic Era', Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (eds.), Questions of Third Cinema, BFI, London, 1989, p 102.

16 Hebdige, op cit, p 216.

Syncretic relations are, in this sense, traversed by a double movement of both alliance and critique. Syncretism involves neither 'flagrant compromise' (ultimately a transposition of the logic of contradiction to a quantitative transaction), nor 'uncritical acceptance' (ie, pluralist inclusion), but rather a process which articulates elements in a manner that modifies their intelligibility and transforms their combinatory spaces. The Egyptian hieroglyphics, for example, identified by Willie Ninja as one element of vogue, can be seen as an assertion of the heritage claimed by Africanism in the diaspora. Indeed, the paraphernalia that surrounds the voguers interviewed in Paris Is Burning often includes gilded Egyptian heads — reminders of a proud African past, as well as indices of non-white standards of beauty. At the same time, however, this aesthetic appropriation also connects vogueing with the (white) gay tradition of self- display through the 'exotic', ie, through what is literally out of visibility. Michael Moon, for instance, suggests that Orientalist narratives, in which Western/male supremacy represses the (over)sensual Orientals, have had a special resonance for gay audiences subjected to homophobic oppression; the flamboyant re-enactment of these narratives has enabled gays, in turn, to stage performances of political resistance. Jack Smith's films, particularly Flaming Creatures, are examples for Moon of this type of re-appropriation which, he writes, "fueled innumerable small- and large-scale eruptions of queer rebellion.. ."14 Thus, two discourses apparently separate (and often considered 'opposed') are syncretized in vogueing: those of Africanist and of gay struggles. These elements engage, to use Clyde Taylor's expression, in an "epistemological underground",15 where oppositional knowledges, dispersed in a field in which the effect of domination both disjoins and subordinates them in historically specific yet continuous ways, nonetheless find structuring connections and challenge hegemony.

Through breakdancing, vogueing establishes another such connection: that of black and hispanic gays with the hip hop culture, that emerged in the South Bronx in the '70s. Writing about the hip hop movement 'Zulu Nation', Dick Hebdige sees it as "rapped in a tradition which valorizes verbal and physical dexterity," and that is "overtly pledged to the sublimation of fight into dance, of conflict into contest, of desperation into style and a sense of self respect."16 This description, which uncannily recalls the spirit of the balls, aligns hip hop and vogueing with an African diasporic tradition that includes limbo dance contests in the West Indies and the martial arts of capoeira in Brazil. Vogueing, however, multiplies the fronts of struggle in alignment by repositioning breakdancing within an emergent history of black and hispanic gay pride, thereby critiquing certain (hetero)sexist currents within hip hop. Thus, the syncretic articulation is shown to entail not simply the destruc(tura)tion nor the unqualified acceptance of preceding discourses, but their (re)strucruration.

Similar antagonistic tensions and affinities also obtain between voguers and the attitudes of fashion. In Paris Is burning, pre-op transsexual Venus Extravaganza can be seen to underscore tensions with fashion magazines' essentialist representations of woman, by foregrounding the constructed character of her own womanness in performance. At the same time, however, Venus' plans of stardom (as a fashion model) and/or 'normalcy' (as a suburban housewife) also reinforce her affinities with "the

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17 Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, Hill and Wang, New York, 1983, pp 256-257.

18 'Reel to Real: a conversation between Jennie Livingston and Todd Haynes', OutWeek, No 94, April 17, 1991. Livingston's statement however, suggests a paraphrase of Maiakovsky's classic dictum: what does it mean to represent 'unconventional' practices in 'conventional' forms?

multiplication of persons in a single being which," according to Roland Barthes, "is always considered by Fashion as an index of [woman's] power."17 In this double movement, then, Venus 'deforms' dominant representations of woman-as-essence, as she re-moulds the concept of woman into what may be called woman-as-positionality. Venus is thus articulated to 'woman' in a manner which modifies both the elements articulated — concept of woman, Venus's own subjectivity — and the discourses in which they are now (and were previously) positioned.

Thus, the syncretization of, eg, Egyptian hieroglyphics, breakdancing moves and fashion magazine poses demonstrates how sexuality, gender, class and race are (re)posited in vogueing. A space is thereby opened where different discursive formations can strategically figure unsuspected alignments of significations which, nonetheless, remain distinct.

In this sense, we may revise popular accounts of vogueing's relations with the media. Both Paris Is Burning and Madonna'a Vogue, rather narcissistically (in as far as the media, here, assumes the importance of its own impact), accentuate the 'influence' of the media on voguers. The Hollywood icon medley in Madonna's video, typified by the line "Rita Hayworth gave good face", hails vogueing as the next step in a continuing line of Utopian glamour (epitomized by Madonna herself?), but glosses its positions in the traditions of resistance, outside of Hollywood and camp, to which we have referred. Paris Is Burning, on the other hand, presents voguers as subjects who, though duped by media ideology, more or less unwittingly subvert it in the momentary euphoria of carnivalesque inversion.

Despite these representations, voguers seem more actively and self- consciously critical of the media's racial, sexual and class exclusivities than the notion of influence would indicate. References by voguers in Paris Is Burning to, eg, the pervasive straight white wealthiness of the television commercials that advertise everything from toilet cleaner to toys, would counteract the assumption that voguers simply mechanically assimilate the consumerist propaganda of a media which marginalizes them. Not to mention that the complications of identity enacted in vogueing may considerably problematize the understanding of voguers' engagement with the media as simply a form of alienation from their 'true' selves. However, such critical references and challenges are themselves considerably counteracted, for instance, as Paris Is Burning surreptitiously introduces narrative devices typical of tragedy, psychological case studies and biography, within its 'conventional' (as director Jennie Livingston defines it) documentary form.18 It is by means of such devices that the film acquaints us with Octavia Saint-laurent and Venus Extravaganza. Pan's 7s Burning carefully frames these characters in the apparent privacy of their homes, where they speak confidingly of their abiding esteem for media images; it also accompanies them to and reports on their distinct, public 'destinies', even outside the balls.

The semantic contrast constructed between the personal and the social in these scenes in turn ideologically produces the 'intimate' moments as instances of unmediated access to the characters' 'inner realities'. Indeed, the stories told of Octavia and Venus are so inseminated with these

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Venus Xtravaganza, co-star of PARIS IS BURNING, a film by Jennie Livingston.

Photo Credit: Jennie Livingston

PRESTIGE A DIVISION Of MltAMAI RUMS

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19 "Truth, even when 'caught on the run,' does not yield itself either in names or in filmic frames; and meaning should be prevented from coming to closure at either what is said or what is shown." Trinh T. Minh-ha, 'Documentary Is/Not a Name' , October, No 52, Spring 1990, p 77.

20 Mercer, op cit, p 51.

privileged moments of 'truth' that, through them, the film in effect fabricates a sprurious etiology for the characters' conditions. Octavia and Venus seem irresistibly impelled by the powerful media images that surround them. Here, the overarching active/passive dichotomy implicit in the notion of influence is superimposed onto the closural cause-and- effect logic of narration.19 And predictably, this dichotomy and this logic, as homologous and mutually dependent structures, reinforce each other to the extent that little doubt is left as to the limits of voguers' agency with regard to the media.

Yet, voguers' very appearance in Paris Is Burning (and on Donahue, Malcom McLaren's Deep In Vogue video, etc, not to mention the media- oriented categories in which they perform at balls) suggests an antagonistic scenario: voguers explicitly seek out the media and attempt to conquer it by using it as it uses them. If the media interpellates them as consumers, voguers antagonize such identif icatory hailing by means of performances that defy the limits and the strictures of that address.* It is, for instance, not necessarily their identities as consumers (nor, for that matter, as representatives of the 'real lives' of the other) but as stars (and the mobility between such discursive constructions) that are both enabled and prevented in voguers' relations with the media in its present organization. Their posed articulation thus demands the radical, structural change of both the media and voguers' interpellated, marginalized subjectivities. The engagement of vogueing in the politics of representation in this sense exceeds the cut-and-dry terms of a reductive dialectic, where opposing poles (and the quantity of their influence) would be clearly fixed and identified. Voguers' confrontations with the media are instead marked by the shifting limits of their own agency in a process overdetermined by historical circumstances. Less informed by the fatalism of cooptation than the discourse of influence would insinuate, voguers' simultaneous critique and embrace of the media is played out in a struggle over appropriation.

The stress on influence in Paris Is Burning, then, (despite its sympathetic portrayals), might well be read as symptomatic of, as Kobena Mercer writes in another context, "an underlying anxiety to pin down and categorize a practice that upsets and disrupts fixed expectations and normative assumptions";20 in other words, as an integral part of the film's very ambition to normatively 'explain' vogueing. In order to accomplish its explanatory mission, Paris Is Burning institutes a pedagogical relationship with its audience, a relationship indexed in the film by a univocal system of questions and answers that attempts to translate voguers' rich and creative vocabulary. The word 'reading', to take just one example, is flashed in white letters upon a black screen as voguers are summoned to

* Here, we are not implying a subject that would be, to use Gayatri Spivak's phrase, 'ideology- transcendent'. ('Can the Subaltern speak?', in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1988, p 297). Rather, we are suggesting, in an extrapolation of Donald Morton's reading of Paul Goodman's work, a subject as 'boundary- relation', ie, "capable of challenging 'introjected social norms' (ideological common sense) [for,] though it is an interpellated subject, it still possesses — as historical agent — at least the power of resistance." ('The Cultural Politics of (Sexual) Knowledge: On the Margins with Goodman', Social Text, Nos 25-26, 1990, p 229).

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21 See V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1986.

22 Outweek, No 94, April 17, 1991.

provide an accurate definition. Here, the ideological tenets grounding the film's pedagogical operation (starkly inscribed in the very black-and- whiteness of the graphic images) can be seen not only to presuppose an audience uniformed about vogueing, but also to circumscribe the critical dis-semination of the terms' significations. Indeed, in (black and hispanic) gay idiom, 'reading' acts as a shifting signifier that performs a varying critique of apparently flawless — or fixed — representations. Its homographic contiguity to normative reading implicitly challenges the conceptual assuredness which ordinarily accompanies that practice. Thus the masterly move towards monosemy which characterizes the search for definitive meanings in Paris Is Burning may not too distantly recall the classic philological procedure that reduces signs to signals. According to Volosinov, this procedure allows for the wholesale commodification of entire discursive ensembles as it concomitantly disallows conceptualization of their signs' living multiaccentuality and dialogically critical engagement.21 By (re)encoding a system of self-same differences as its interpretive grid, Paris Is Burning in effect delimits the ideological terrain upon which vogueing may operate. As a competent ethnographic primer, the film establishes a structural gap between 'the (fixed) world of voguers' and 'the (fixed) audience', a gap supposedly bridged by a civilising filmmaking, always in search of exotic, authentic phenomena.

It is in this sense that 'influence' and its companion other, 'cooptation', acquire an additional function: that of distinguishing an authentic vogueing from one corrupted by commercialization. This logic turns one voguers's statement, that the balls are no longer what they used to be, into a piece of evidence used to reassure us that Paris Is Burning has itself 'captured' the real vogueing at its height — a strategy of validation retrotractivly further underscored at the film's very beginning, when a character's voice- over announces that the film is about "the ball circuit and the gay people that are involved in it". Yet, the idea of authenticity, as we have suggested, is problematized by vogueing itself as a syncretic practice. We might consider, in this sense, Madonna's Vogue video less a cooptation (or corruption) than a rearticulation of vogueing, a rearticulation that is not necessarily juxtaposed to the 'authenticity' of vogueing as a subcultural practice, but that is prompted by vogueing as a knowledge practice which produces identity as mobile and unfixed.

Still, the rhetoric of authenticity in Paris Is Burning serves to replace any sustained effort towards authorial self-reflexivity, and instead enthrones the authority of experience. Indeed, it is precisely upon the basis of the experiential — an epistemological category which dissimulates its own appeals to arbitrarily structured forms of (re)cognition by naturalizing them as immediate presence — that Paris Is Burning is, as Livingston herself declares, "giving you definitions... It's taking forms that you are used to and doing something else to them."22 Hence, the film ultimately interprets the knowledge voguers practice, that "something else", by relegating — and thus containing — it to certain subject position(alitie)s, ie, to a certain race, gender, sexual orientation and class, and 'their experience'. Not surprisingly, then, voguers are depicted as grotesque embodiments of contradiction (and not antagonism) as they 'playfully reverse' existing power/identity hierarchies. At the expense of its syncretic

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Tongues Untied, courtsey: Frameline, San Francisco

reconfigurations of the real, vogueing remains fixed in a semiotic realm of differential relations so acquiescent to the dictates of a facile multiculturalism. It becomes just another instance (or moment) in a chain of rationalization which operates in terms of clearly identifiable and stable oppositions (say, black/white, poor/rich, gay/straight, female/male, etc), and which signifies, multiplies and hierarchicizes difference by 'explaining' it in terms of closed, arrested categories. An entire heterogeneous community (voguers walk not only as, say, 'Virginia Slims Girls', but also as homeboys, soldiers, executives, students, etc) is in this sense grouped into a unified, homogeneous Other, housed under the rubric of 'their experience' and fixed in an unproblematized sequence of absolute differences.

In Tongues Untied, on the other hand, rather than the experiential being deployed to 'explain' vogueing, it is vogueing that is recruited to redefine the experiential. Marlon Riggs' appearance in the (auto)biographical narrative of Tongues Untied reflexively foregrounds the experiential as a construct which, rather than homogenizing an 'authentic(ated)' black gay identity, diversifies black gay discourses. Thus his statement that "[Tongues Untied] crosses many boundaries of genre" indexically illustrates what, for him, is an important part of the video's message, "that the way to

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23 Ron Simmons, 'Tongues Untied: An interview with Marlon Riggs', Hemphill, op cit, pp 191, 193.

24 David Silverman and Brian Torode, The Material Word: Some theories of language and its limits. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1980, p 6. See also Mercer, op cit, p 52.

25 'Posing', Difference: On Representation and Sexuality, catalogue. New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1985.

26 New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, Verso, London, 1990, p xi.

break loose of the schizophrenia in trying to define identity is to realize that you are many things within one person."23 Indeed, the vogueing sequence (along with many others in the video's constitutive 'digressions') work's to render identity heterogeneous. By re-introducing the collective into the filmic discourse, vogueing here challenges the univocality which often accompanies common understandings of the experiential. However, as a syncretic articulation, vogueing can be seen to radicalize even the search for a definite — albeit heterogeneous — black gay identity. By emphasizing the inconclusiveness of the self in antagonism, vogueing interrupts the very coherence of the experiential which informs the collective T constructed in Tongues Untied.

By 'interruption' here, we mean a practice which critically separated and (re)opens the closed structures into which existing discursive configurations have ossified.24 As it syncretizes elements in performance, vogueing effectively literalizes interruption in the form of the pose. In Craig Owens' psychoanalytic account of it, the pose stands in an aggressive relation to (the desire of) power.25 It inscribes the phallic compulsion to halt the 'dance of signs' and (re)produce significations; it also dramatizes, through its very artificiality, the untenability of this desire for stasis in the movement of history. It is in this sense that interruption can be understood as a point of dislocation between the subject and the structure that supposedly contains it. Thus the pose becomes a form of resistance to the evil eye (Lacan's fascinum) of the subject-structures that would immobilize it in the chain of significations.

In Madonna's video this resistant pose — encapsulated in the otherizing ethnography of Paris Is Burning and emergent in the stroboscopic lyricism of Tongues Untied — is given a new, (de)politicized character. It becomes a (star) vehicle of escape to the polymorphous perversity of an idealized, universally available dance floor where, as the lyrics go, "it makes no difference if you're black or white, if you're a boy or a girl". Madonna thus defines the very topos of multiculturalism as a place where antagonisms would be erased and struggles rendered superfluous. It is in this indifferent space, underwritten by what Ernesto Ladau calls the violence of the universal,26 that objective differential identities expand indefinitely. Here we discover a crucial link between Paris Is Burning and Madonna's Vogue, between realism and escapism; both are synecdochic of the prevailing constructions of the multicultural. They fetishize an objectified other and/or subsume her under a myth of equality. Both partake in the production of newness, a process which purports to keep us up-to-date as it continually adds on novelties to a relational system that absorbs them; both contain vogueing beneath the pluralist umbrella of hipness. Conceiving of knowledge in quantitative terms, this safely heterogeneous yet hegemonic multiculturalism excludes nothing.

What is ignored in this process, however, is the status of desire which, in our own interruptive (rather than interpretive) reading of vogueing, continually reassesses differences in qualitative terms. In this sense, voguers can be seen to pose desire itself as a form of counter-hegemonic knowledge. Understood as a syncretic articulation, vogueing explores the possible within the existing. By embracing, critiquing and restructuring, eg, ethnicity, gayness, gender, class, etc, it intervenes in sovereign

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discursive structures — like the experiential and the authentic — which would reduce its elements to immanent moments of a naturalized system of differences and which vogueing 'reads' as inadequate to its reconfigurations of the real. Interrupting the closure of identities and of their relations, vogueing's syncretisms pro-pose new possibilities of struggle.

This paper was presented at the Society for Cinema Studies Conference, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, May 1991. Our thanks to Patricia Leonardi, Ella Shohat and Bob Stam for critique and valuable insights.

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