[BRIEF NOTE] Paris is Burning

[rfmcdonald]

I've been thinking of ABBA a fair bit over the past month. This leads me inevitably to Madonna's new single "Hung Up," which leads inevitably to her multiple uncrediting borrowings, which leads to her 1990 "Vogue," and thus, via an uninterrupted chain of associations Paris is Burning. A well-reviewed 1990 documentary about the phenomenon of Harlem's drag balls, its coverage of the aspirant celebrities in this circuit and their desires for a happy life--equated by the largely Hispanic and African-American participants with wealth and whiteness--posed critical questions about the nature of identity in competitive materialist societies (1, 2). How could anyone be free to fashion an identity for themselves if their desires were so profoundly molded by outside society?