Pride: pushing against forced performances of gender

Pride:

1. a feeling of deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one’s own achievements
2. consciousness of one’s own dignity.

Every year the last weekend in June acts as a reminder of the Stonewall riots in 1969, which set the precedent and founded the importance of pride parades in the LGBTQ community. This year, In the wake of the shooting in Orlando, Florida at Pulse nightclub, these parades have swelled in size and publicity as they are married to the sense of grief, loss, and violence that the gay community has been facing for decades and continues to face today. For allies and members of the community alike, how can we voice solidarity? What enables expression and what suppresses unheard voices? How can we support Pride? Particularly, how can we enable Pride to grow, be represented, and better understood and represented in public media?

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After the recent shooting in Orlando, the first example that naturally comes to mind is the winding, glorious queer love letter that was published almost a century ago: Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf. It was written, it is thought, as an act of love or admiring towards Woolf’s rumored lover, Vita Sackville-West. The novel follows Orlando on a gender-bending tale that lasts 300 years. Orlando begins the story as a young nobleman in Elizabethan England until one day in his mid 30s he wakes up as a woman. Throughout the rest of the 400+ page long book he changes back and forth between being a man or woman,  doesn’t age, and has a fluid sexuality. Orlando performs each role well and convincingly – it is a loud, proud, and loving text. Written during a time of intense literary censorship in the UK Orlando “turn[ed] compulsory heterosexuality into a carnival of Eros, Woolf toys with the options by using the sex change subversively rather than for protective coloration. She draws attention to the constructed nature of the sexuality and gender of her protagonist and torments the censor with daring suggestions of cross-sex desire…” (Leslie Kathleen Hankins, 1997) Written almost 90 years ago, it inspired investigation into the same questions about gender and sexual orientation that continued throughout the last century, namely through the film adaptation (Sally Potter, 1992) aptly starring Tilda Swinton as Orlando, but also as the name “Orlando” went on to be associated with women’s writing more generally. However, it seems that today mainstream media and specifically filmmaking continue to push questions of gender and sexuality and LGBTQ protagonists aside.

For example, the 2016 Edinburgh International Film Festival is surprisingly buffered from films that bend gender expectations and ideas of sexuality. The number of films featuring an LGBTQ protagonist can be counted on one hand. Two of these films stand out as strong examples of different ways of portraying contemporary issues: one through a buddy-comedy (turned thriller) that adopts a more “normalizing” approach, another through a coming of age story that integrates traditional scholarly takes on gender and sexuality. The first, Angry Indian Goddesses (Pan Nalin, 2015) follows seven empowered women who, even from the very first scene, we see challenging the current state of women’s rights in India. These women are all gathered together by Frida Da Silva (Sarah-Jane Dias) for – to the guests’ surprise – her wedding. None of them, however (including the audience), knows who the groom is. Having taken a vow of silence until noon, we learn who Frieda is marrying through a game of charades: she closes herself behind two doors and literally comes out of the closet. Her friends’ reactions are varied: one faints and the rest take a moment in shock before beginning to celebrate with her. Gay marriage, however, is illegal in India and the institutions in place are against the union – even Frieda’s father refuses to attend the wedding. But the relationship between Frieda and her revealed fiance, Nargis Nasreen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), remains steady as they retain the support of their friends and are enabled to publicly (to an extent) and proudly show their love and affection for each other. Their union stands as a protest to the multilayered systems of oppression laid out around them. In celebrating their marriage and relationship with their friends they are able to enjoy a level of dignity that is denied them when they live in secret. The audience, however, is ultimately denied the pleasure of witnessing their wedding. The film ends with a funeral instead due to the brutal rape-murder of the youngest woman, Jo (Amrit Maghera). It reminds the audience that while individuals can independently fight systems of oppression, ultimately it takes more to instigate positive, large scale change. Angry Indian Goddesses, lacking a concrete resolution or satisfying conclusion, left audiences to sit in ambiguity as the credits rolled. Leaving the film open ended heightens the level of audience participation in the story – both in interpreting it as well as by sharing these interpretations. It allows the film to start a dialog that can go beyond its fictional walls. However, the ending also reveals that perhaps cinema is still overly reluctant to look into same-sex marriages as viable for mainstream audiences. This film, advertised as a India’s “first female buddy comedy” and often compared to the Hollywood film Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011), departed from the buddy comedy with this tragedy. While Bridesmaids ended with a heterosexual wedding and a number of other budding romances. Is its departure from genre an effort to avoid the topic of same-sex marriage in India, or a means to set it in a larger context of oppression?

While Angry Indian Goddesses opens a dialog on gender and sexuality in terms of legality – Viva (Paddy Breathnach, 2015) delves into what these concepts even mean to an individual, particularly the more performative and even camp aspects of gender. Viva follows Jesus (Hector Median), an aspiring drag queen from Havana, Cuba, who – due to his mother’s death and his father’s imprisonment – is left alone to support himself.  Initially doing so as a hair cutter, Jesus auditions to perform for one of his clients, Mama (Luis Alberto Garcia) in Mama’s nightclub as “Viva”. We see Viva develop a routine beginning with the first basic audition through to a final developed performance. However, when his father returns from prison, Jesus decides to stop performing until gaining his father’s acceptance and support. What his father interprets as degrading, Jesus sees as the most empowering thing that he can do. He feels liberated, in control, and is even able to support himself by performing. What’s special about the film, is even as Jesus struggles, the audience – both of the film and within the film – is captivated by Jesus’ performances- which conveys a deep appreciation for his vocation, showing how Jesus transforms into a completely different person. Jesus is lanky, quiet, aimless, and often shown with his arms crossed and looking like he isn’t sure how to hold his body – evoking Susan Sontag’s aesthetics of camp by providing us with a naive “sinuous figure.” Viva, in contrast, knows exactly what she is wearing, doing, and provoking with every move that she makes. Viva utilizes everything that Jesus is told is wrong about him – his femininity, sexuality, even his body – and proudly provokes visceral responses in the onlookers as she controls her image.

Through the topic of drag queens, Breathnach is exploring Judith Butler’s gender performativity: “gender is… an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” Through her concept that all gender is performative, she promotes the idea that a drag performance is not a deviation from gender norms, but rather just as much an expression of one’s gender as any normative or traditional definition would dictate. Additionally, her caveat that it relates or applies to any specific time enables a fluidity that allows for one person to express more than one gender – as drag queens often do. “Gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self,” Butler continues. Breathnach’s depiction of Viva promotes this understanding of gender as “the illusion of an abiding gendered self” by showing the drag queens as they interact with the audience and each other – not simply isolated in their performance or costumes – everyone involved “abides” to the “illusion” of the new gender identities. By creating and embracing their own gender identities drag queens are able to proudly pronounce who they are. Audiences of Viva fully experience this pride in a way that they were denied it in Angry Indian Goddesses. By the end, everyone (including his father) is able to see how the transformation into Viva not only liberates Jesus, but also provides him with pride and dignity – it allows him to create his identity.

Pride is a prevailing theme in both films. Both make the audience aware of large obstacles socially and politically, however they also reveal the resilience of members of the LGBTQ community and highlight the necessity for pride in the context of this concrete threat of violence that members face everyday. Interesting that this recurring topic didn’t have more presence at EIFF, in what is typically a very forward thinking collection of films. The ideas, which have been around for decades, of gender as performative and sexuality as multifaceted and fluid are waiting to be fully recognized in public discourse that are able to go beyond Pride parades each June. Mainstream media needs to work towards more fluid representations of gender and sexuality – and do so, so that everyone can have pride.