I should have posted this here! I’ll be writing about this sort of stuff too.
Or maybe I should just consolidate and have one site. We’ll see!
Voguing: The Message, by Jack Walworth, David Bronstein & Dorothy Low, 1989
Another good film on the gay ballrooms and drag scene of eighties NY. Predates Paris is Burning by a couple of years.I can’t wait to watch this.
In all of the years I’ve been a graduate student, one of my absolute favorite parts has been the class I created and taught on the sociology of popular culture. It was a summer course and I taught it twice, two summers in a row. It was the first course I taught as a solo instructor, an undergraduate seminar, and I was full of enthusiasm. I got to create the syllabus! I got to prove my mettle! But more than that I loved the material, maybe more than any material I’ve loved except organization theory and critical theory the first time I came across it.
One of texts we read was Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which he wrote in 1979 and which is rather famous. If you haven’t read it, you should, as it’s also rather fabulous and fascinating. Certainly there are criticisms of it, but those criticisms are also fascinating, so get to reading.
Anyway, one of the points Hebdige makes in the book is that a subculture is not simply a group whose culture is different from the larger culture that surrounds them. A subculture is a group whose culture that exists in opposition to the majority culture. The subculture’s culture is deviant, a subversion of the normal culture.
Definitions are always, of course, up for debate, but I felt it was important to show how the word “subculture” has come to be used almost interchangeably with “lifestyle.” This takes power away from a concept that can show how groups in which the sub(versive) culture is threatening enough to really and truly scare mainstream culture into either squashing it or absorbing it.
I showed my class documentaries and movies about subcultures to give them an idea about how this occurred and what the results were. Yes, I showed scenes from The Filth and The Fury to give the students an idea of how scary punk had been to a conservative public that had never seen such a youth uprising before. I showed parts of Dogtown and Z-Boys, to show how a small, insane skateboard subculture had really maddened the larger mainstream culture of skateboarding and took it over, only to be itself mainstreamed.
And then I showed important parts of Paris Is Burning. I showed black and Latino drag queens having their drag queen ball, clothed and nude, at 3:00 am. I showed them looking at mainstream white culture that excluded them and subverting it by inhabiting it as black and Latino gay men in the ’80s, and then I showed the prices they paid: having a white star take over their style and make it hers or being erased by violence. For students whose closest encounter with “subculture” was often Hot Topic or being told not to skateboard at the mall, it was a huge eye opener into what a subculture could be.
If you’ve never seen Paris Is Burning, I cannot recommend it enough.
