ABSTRACT

This chapter joins a few others that deal explicitly with film and video (Chapters 6, 9, and 10). It is also one of the few that brings a historical theory to bear on the contemporary practice of posing in the community studied. At the same time, the essay is an intervention into the critical analysis of Jennie Livingston’s film that had itself become fairly canonical, but within which attention to the dance form itself – voguing – had remained marginal as had any formal choreographic analysis of what is shown in the film. One reader for Discourses of Dance, the journal in which it had first appeared, questioned why I would return to this topic. My sense is that it is a rendez-vous of cultural criticism that is always worth revisiting. Hence, the film itself is pictured as generating a critical quarrel – again in the classical French sense of the term – that never properly ends.

I want to take voguing not to just ‘Paris is Burning’ but I want to take it to the real Paris, and make the real Paris burn.

– Willi Ninja, quoted from Paris is Burning