Dude, who even knows.

3rd April 2021

Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 58 notes

kontextmaschine:

Regularly think about the way Paris is Burning ends with Venus like, talking about her hopes and dreams and you’re like “aww, I hope it works out for that kid” and then puts up a title card like “months later, Venus Xtravaganza’s corpse was found stuffed under the bed of a seedy hotel room”

Actually I forget, would Venus even have used “her” or am I reading contemporary identities into the past here? I talked about the rare depictions of gender transition in the era, but back then RuPaul-style “female impersonation” drag was actually fairly prominent and the idea of “crossdressing” as a fetish (weirdly often w/r/t J. Edgar Hoover) was more in play

Tagged: Venus Xtravaganza

  1. girlgregorsamsa reblogged this from anais-ninja-bitch
  2. anais-ninja-bitch reblogged this from kontextmaschine
  3. endlesssky reblogged this from kontextmaschine
  4. surd48 reblogged this from encriptado
  5. encriptado reblogged this from kontextmaschine
  6. calvarycade reblogged this from kontextmaschine and added:
    Pretty sure Venus ID'd as female, although I watched it a couple months ago. There's a section where the difference...
  7. plum-soup said: But Venus talks specifically about her desire to be like a rich privileged white lady instead of poor and criminalized so she clearly saw herself as a woman and had like aspirations to realize that with surgery and hormones eventually iirc before she was killed
  8. plum-soup said: Although that word is of course “too modern” to be applied to someone that lived less than half a century ago according to most.
  9. plum-soup said: As opposed to gay men who didn’t do drag. Like I guess this is all to say that drag queen doesn’t denote gender so much as having been amab and then revolted against the traditional gender roles in a way that went beyond merely being gay I guess. But often it was about being an amab who considered herself a legit woman. Like Marsha p Johnson identified herself as a “street queen”. Where does that even fit into the modern SJ lexicon? But despite that, we all know she was BASICALLY a trans woman
  10. plum-soup said: Yeah self identification was a little bit less codified and exact back then so you had people iding as very vague things that would probably really confuse and infuriate your modern political discourse-er. Like many of them saw themselves as women but identified as drag queens rather than transgender or transsexual. But drag queen was a more vague term back then too. Idk there were def drag queens that still ID’d as men and there still are, but even they had a unique conception of their gender
  11. kontextmaschine said: @wrappedinplastique huh!
  12. old-flesh said: Venus & Octavia St Laurent were definitely both women who happened to do drag and participate in the ball scene as opposed to Dorian Corey & Pepper LaBeija who definitely solely identified as drag queens
  13. kontextmaschine posted this
    Regularly think about the way Paris is Burning ends with Venus like, talking about her hopes and dreams and you're like...