Sean Tarjoto
Boundary Crossings
Prof. E.F. White
10.30.00

	The subjects in Jennie Livingston’s documentary on drag queen ball scene, Paris is Burning, are not subversive to the extent that radical sociological structural change can be affected in their open public presentation, or within any performative context. Theatrical or discursive drag queen performance functions with three underlying issues, all of which sabotage the potentially subversive of their act: (1) that the only kind of current transgender performative must invoke either one of the heterosexual binary, (2) that this gender destabilization is what provokes the heterosexual project to defend itself - and to use extreme violence is not beyond its measure, and that is concurrently reinforced by the (3) lack of subversive intentionality within the drag performative context. The lattermost is what particularly weakens drag’s potentially subversive qualities if it is against the juridical social sphere, because it erases what is necessary in any radical sociological paradigm shift: a conscious and focused resistance to the oppressive hegemony.  
	In Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion, Judith Butler explains that the subversive quality of drag resides in its reflection toward the heterosexual, which forces that destabilization by deconstructing its ideals.  The heterosexual project is the most successful insofar as its sociological prevalence exists as a default category within the currently dominating hegemony. Butler writes, “[D]rag is subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness and originality” (125).   The “defaultness” of heterosexuality is manufactured by its being hailed as what was intentional from nature, and that any such opposing sexual scheme is aberrant, or a “mistake of nature”.  Within the absurdity of the argument is simultaneously the insertion point, so to speak, of structural rearrangement as well as the nexus of homophobic, racist, transgender and transsexual alienation. Its rearticulation and recapitulation is possible only through the mass dissemination of the tools of sociological inquiry. But it is because this process can only be registered through the unequal economic and racial stratification of the heterosexual hegemony that it is undermined - and this is where the subjects of Paris is Burning are entrenched, or at least in the subjectivity of Livingston’s position as the white lesbian filmmaker who provides no commentary on the race lines drawn between the “houses”.  While essential to the project this division between black and Latino/Latina is what seriously jeopardizes the effectiveness of subversion. It is between its construction as an arbitrary alliance for the sake of competition and its clear demarcation as created by race that calls for a restructuring within the drag ball sociological sphere. It is also this area where one can pinpoint that the intentionality of subversion does not exist.
	Althusser’s notion of the police-subject interpellation is a unilateral act that is composed of fear and recognition at expense (Butler 121).  The policeman’s performative discursive act formulates the relationship: “Stop”, “Hey you”, “You are under arrest”; where the larger sociological sphere represented by the police and the law dominates the accused.  And it is accusation that fundamentally cripples the defensive capabilities of the reprimanded.  In the case of the queens, there is the accusation that their gender is discursively aberrant, and that their sexuality aberrant on the level which heterosexuality anchors itself within the category of default. It is its much deeper location in the psychosexual structure that causes the deep rupture between the imaginary and the symbolic responsible for creating an impotent subversion. In the drag queen Lacanian symbolic is the act of drag itself, and its compulsion to repeat the injury of accusation is the imaginary. Within this shared social milieu is the foundation of its language - in the discursive and theatrical performatives of voguing, reading, mopping and Realness. 
	Drag’s problem of being discursively subversive within the hegemony of western thought can be illustrated through Butler’s allegorization of “heterosexual melancholy”. Butler’s explication for the edge of subversive drag cuts the boundaries of heterosexual performativity(Harper 41).  The self-perpetuating binaries of male/female merge to form part of the heterosexual/homosexual binary (it might be argued this binary can be “merged” when considering the transsexual/transgendered). 
	From here I will argue that the problem of the issue originates not only in that unprovoked and unorganized subversion stands little chance against the powerful hegemony of default, but also in that in any binary conceptualization subversive effects of any kind are futile. Where binaries characterize Western hegemony and theory (as in the dualism of Cartesian thought) might a non-binary form of discourse be necessary to enact successful subversion.  While this may be out of the practical context of the subversive drag ball, I offer it as a superlative principle for sociological change. 
	The task of subverting the hegemonic default is concurrent with erasing the demarcations of marked and the unmarked from themselves.  The context of the Lacanian symbolic-imaginary provides useful analysis of the accusational-compulsion, the police as a repressive apparatus, and the heterosexual binary project. But it seems without recompense to allow a further theoretical delineation of the issues within the currently binary framework responsible for constructing the “non-optional” heterosexual gender boundaries.  An alternative is to create new categories whose definitions originate from within the boundaries themselves in order to simultaneously transcend and render them obsolete, but this has implicit binaries as well.